Indie Crime Fiction of the Month for January 2018

Posted on January 30, 2018 by Cora

Welcome to the latest edition of “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some December books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Our new releases cover the broad spectrum of crime fiction. We have cozy mysteries, small town mysteries, culinary mysteries, paranormal mysteries, hardboiled mysteries, historical mysteries, police procedurals, legal thrillers, crime thrillers, psychological thrillers, men’s adventure, private eyes, missing persons, prosecutors, reluctant witches, domestic violence, murdered grandmothers, the pit of crawling death and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Crime Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Indie Crime Scene, a group blog which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things crime fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

A Frosty Mug of Murder by Constance BarkerA Frosty Mug of Murder by Constance Barker:

Who Killed the Black Widow?

The Grumpy Chicken Irish Pub is in full blast mode when proprietor Ginger O’Mallory discovers someone has offed the town’s Black Widow before the woman can take out another husband. Secrets swirl and the hooch flows in this brand new series centering around an Irish Pub with a crazy clucker name. And what is with all the spooky goings on with a ghost chicken attached? Find out in this hilarious romp filled with colorful and wisecracking characters.

 

The Crawling Death by Cora Buhlert
The Crawling Death by Cora Buhlert:

1966. Freelance troubleshooter Todd Donovan is hired to locate Dr. Pat Turner, a biologist who has gone missing in the South American jungle. It seems like an easy job at first, but then Todd finds himself staring into the barrel of a gun.

Captured and taken to the jungle compound of the drug lord Durango, Todd finally meets up with Dr. Turner, who turns out to be not just a beautiful woman, but also Durango’s prisoner.

Durango is not the sort of man to leave potential witnesses alive. And so Todd and Dr. Pat Turner are soon facing a painful end in Durango’s pit of crawling death…

This is a short adventure story of approx. 5500 words or 20 pages in the style of the men’s adventure pulps of the 1960s.

The Mystery of Ruby's Sugar by Rose DonovanThe Mystery of Ruby’s Sugar by Rose Donovan:

Christmas, 1934.

The snow lies heavy around Pauncefort Hall. Dress designers Ruby Dove and Fina Aubrey-Havelock leave behind their Oxford exams to rescue Lady Charlotte’s wardrobe. But what Lady Charlotte doesn’t know is that Ruby is on a mission—a mission to avenge her family and bring down an empire.

As the weather worsens, Ruby and Fina are drawn into the intrigues of Lady Charlotte’s other guests, who include a princess, a furiously left-wing don, a West End starlet—and, it seems, a murderer. After the two resident cads are poisoned, Ruby and Fina must find the culprit and still carry out their secret plans—all before the law arrives. But Pauncefort Hall can remain snowbound for only so long.

The Mystery of Ruby’s Sugar is the first book in the Ruby Dove historical cozy mystery series.

Bleeding Levee Blues by Nick DorseyBleeding Levee Blues by Nick Dorsey:

Tom Connelly left the New Orleans Police Department after the madness of Hurricane Katrina, and his life has gone downhill ever since. Shunned by his brothers in blue, he broke down and gave in to drink. He lost his friends. He lost his wife. And now his son barely knows his name.

But a figure from his past has asked Tom to help a wealthy politician find his missing daughter. If Tom keeps this quiet, the politician promises Tom the one thing he needs most: redemption. A name cleared from past controversy. A new life moving forward.

The search for the young woman leads Tom into the dark corners of the decaying New Orleans landscape and beyond, right into the heart of a deadly human trafficking organization and to the other side of the world. Now Tom isn’t just worried about redeeming himself, he’s hoping he can get out of this alive.

For Better or Worse by Donna Huston MurrayFor Better or Worse by Donna Huston Murray:

Finally back to her spunky self after the loss of her husband, men have once again become an issue for amateur sleuth Ginger Barnes—men who mistreat their wives, men accused of murder, and men who ask her out.

While working on a DIY project at her newlywed daughter’s house, a bag of bricks is thrown from the neighboring third-story window. Next, pops that sound like muffled gunshots have Gin racing for her phone. Eric, who lives in the house with his grandmother, claims she’s obsessed with mystery novels. Yet after the septuagenarian falls down a flight of stairs, she’s so frantic to keep Eric away that Gin must intervene. Was the fall actually attempted murder?In her husband’s eyes, Cissie Voight can’t do anything right. Gin occasionally helps the frazzled young mother, and when she needs a dresser carried upstairs, Gin brings Eric along. Bad move! The electricity between the two new acquaintances sparks a chilling premonition. This time Gin’s good intentions will produce grave consequences—for everyone involved.

Deep Zero by V.S. KemanisDeep Zero by V.S. Kemanis:

It’s one a.m. Do you know where your teenagers are? Prosecutor Dana Hargrove makes it a point to know. But one night, in the dead of winter, she should have known more.

In February 2009, Dana is the newly-elected district attorney of a suburban county north of Manhattan, where she lives with her husband, attorney Evan Goodhue, and their two teenage children. The Great Recession has seen a rise in substance abuse and domestic violence. It’s also the era of burgeoning social media, an intoxicating lure for wayward and disaffected teens who find new methods of victimization: a game to some, with no thought of the consequences.

During an arctic cold snap, the body of a high school student is discovered, lodged in the ice floes of the Hudson River. People are crying for justice, but there doesn’t seem to be a law that fits. Days later, in one hellish night, Dana’s children are sucked into a criminal investigation against several of their classmates, making her a convenient target for community outrage.

In Deep Zero, the fourth standalone legal mystery featuring the dynamic prosecutor, Dana walks the tightrope like never before in her tricky balance between professional ethics and family loyalties.

Witchin' USA by Amanda M. LeeWitchin’ USA by Amanda M. Lee:

Hadley Hunter has lived a normal life, in a normal suburb, with a normal job and a normal father. All that changes when a grandmother she didn’t even know existed dies and leaves her a fabulous lighthouse on Moonstone Bay Island.

Hadley, ready for an adventure, decides to check things out and finds herself plunged into a world she never envisioned.
From the naked woman swimming in the ocean outside her back door, to the hot sheriff who seems to be hiding a secret, Hadley is intrigued from the start. That’s before magical things start happening – including to Hadley – and a body washes up on the beach.

It seems Moonstone Bay has a killer on the loose … and he may be stalking Hadley, although no one can figure out why.

Things are about to spiral for Moonstone Bay’s newest reluctant – and baffled – witch. She has to learn about the past, investigate the present and hold on to her future for dear life. Along the way she will meet a bevy of new friends who have a few particular abilities … and a lot of really odd quirks.

Set sail for adventure, because once you visit Moonstone Bay, you’ll never be the same again.

Murder at Home by Faith MartinMurder at Home by Faith Martin:

Meet DI HILLARY GREENE, a policewoman struggling to save her career and catch criminals.

Flo Jenkins is found murdered in her armchair, a paperknife sticking out of her chest. The old woman was well liked and nothing seems to have been stolen from her home. And it was common knowledge that she only had weeks to live.

Why kill a dying woman? This is going to be one of the toughest cases yet for Hillary to solve.

Hillary also has to deal with a new colleague who has a terrible temper and a rocky past.

With no forensics, no leads, and only a drug-addict nephew as a suspect, will this be Hillary’s first failure to solve a murder case?

Gone with the Ghost by Erin McCarthyGone with the Ghost by Erin McCarthy:

Bailey Burke has had a rough six months—it’s not easy thinking your romantic overtures toward your best friend caused him to kill himself. Except that’s exactly what happened. Ryan is very much dead, having shot himself with his own police-issued gun. Guilt and grief shouldn’t cause hallucinations though, but six months after Ryan went into the ground, Bailey is freaking out and swearing his ghost is standing in her kitchen. Which he is…

Ryan claims he didn’t commit suicide, but was murdered, and he needs Bailey to help him find his killer so he can earn his ticket out of purgatory. Ryan’s counting on a stairway to heaven, as opposed to wings, since that might be a little unmanly for a cop, even a dead one.

An expert in home design, with her own staging business, Bailey can tell you where to place a couch to improve flow and comfort, but solving a crime? Not her area of expertise. But with help from Ryan’s former partner, Marner, she is unraveling the mystery of what happened to Ryan that day… and unwittingly putting herself in grave danger.

Chocolate Cake with a Side of Murder by Meredith PottsChocolate Cake with a Side of Murder by Meredith Potts:

Wedding season has come to Treasure Cove. But a shocking murder threatens to turn the entire town on its head.

Even worse, amateur sleuth Sabrina Daley and her detective fiancé are unable to uncover a single suspect.

Will Sabrina be able to track down the killer before they get away, or will this case go cold?

 

The Accused by Rachel SinclairThe Accused by Rachel Sinclair

Harper is back…and this time it’s personal.

Harper must defend Damien, who has been arrested for the murder of his birth father, Josh Roland. Harper knows that Damien didn’t do it. He couldn’t do it. Yet his past comes to haunt him, as Harper finds out things about Damien that she never knew.

The victim, Josh Roland, was, for many years, a bastard. He sexually harassed most of his female employees and was a serial rapist. He was also involved with many shady and crooked financial deals that broke the many contractors who had the misfortune of dealing with him. In short, there were many, many people who wanted this man dead. So why was Damien made the prime target of the investigation? The answer to this question stuns Harper and causes her to question everything about what she thought she knew about her law partner.

In the meantime, her tween daughters are giving her fits – even Abby has been acting out lately. They’re 13, at the most awkward age imaginable, and Harper is at the end of her rope with them. Throw in some romantic troubles with her longtime beau, Axel, and you have one seriously frazzled lawyer. She keeps it together, Harper-style, which means that her life is perpetually a mess, but she always fights her way out.

With the twists and turns that you’ve come to expect in a Harper Ross/Damien Harrington legal thriller, The Accused is not to be missed!

Who Killed Granny? by Stephanie VillegasWho Killed Granny? by Stephanie Villegas:

When Barbara Smythe finds her grandmother unconscious and sprawled out on the sofa, she suspects foul play. Worried the attacker will come after her next, Barbara rushes around Los Angeles in a desperate attempt to find and warn her twin sister of the peril they face. With the killer hot on her trail, she must race against the clock to discover who killed Granny and bring them to justice.

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A New Release and a New Series – Introducing Two-Fisted Todd

Posted on January 28, 2018 by Cora

Yes, this is another new release announcement and also the announcement of a new series. But first, let’s travel back in time.

About twelve years ago, I sold several short stories to a magazine that billed itself as a successor to the men’s adventure magazines of the 1960s. Most of those stories were historicals featuring more or less scantily clad damsels in distress, while one was a take on the spicy pulps of the 1930s featuring The Silencer. All but one of those stories have been republished in e-book form since then.

At the time, I didn’t know much about the actual men’s adventure mags of the 1950s and 1960s beyond having seen a few cover scans on the internet. The editor of the mag in question helpfully sent me some scans of the interiors of actual men’s adventure mags. What is more, I also came across this art book which collects hundreds of covers of vintage men’s adventure magazines and also offers an overview about the genre, it’s development, prominent themes and subjects and what sort of content might be found inside. So I promptly bought the book.

The art book also included some statements by artists, models and writers who had worked on these magazines. And one of the writers said that quite often, the covers were painted before there was even a single word of content. And afterwards, a writer would be commissioned to write a story to match the cover. And considering some of the really lurid illustrations on those covers – rugged men being attacked by all sorts of likely and unlikely wildlife, while buxom maidens were being tortured and menaced by evil Nazis, evil Communists, evil biker gangs and evil beatniks (the last one doesn’t quite fit) – coming up with a story to match must have been quite a challenge.

Now I have never been able to resist a writing challenge, so I decided to set myself the same challenge as those men’s adventure magazine writers of old, namely to write a story to match the cover of one of those magazines. So I opened the art book at random, picked one of the covers shown and decided to write a story based on it.

Of course, a men’s adventure tale also needed a suitably manly and rugged hero and so I came up with “Two-Fisted” Todd Donovan, a freelance troubleshooter who travels around the globe to solve other people’s problems, provided the price is right. That was a vague enough description to allow for pretty much any kind of adventure from dealing with lethal wildlife via rescuing young women from dastardly villains to tangling with biker gangs and those really, really dangerous beatniks. And of course, it also had series potential.

So now I had my hero and an image to serve as inspiration, so I started writing. The story stalled out at about three-quarters through. So I set it aside. Then life and work got in the way and the magazine changed direction to become a sexy horror mag, depriving Two-Fisted Todd of his intended market. Eventually, self-publishing became a thing, making previously unviable stories suddenly viable again. And through it all, Todd was biding his time in some tropical paradise, a cool drink in his hand, waiting for another job.

Eventually, I started doing the July short story challenges and one of the things I used for inspiration was the art book of men’s adventure magazine covers, because both the lurid covers and ridiculous headlines made for excellent inspiration. And so several of the stories in Bug-Eyed Monsters and the Women Who Love Them as well as the story “Mock Duck” in Operation: Rubber Ducky were inspired by either headlines or illustrations in vintage men’s adventure mags that I found in that book.

Because the art book was such a gold mine of inspiration, I used it again for the 2017 July short story challenge. Only that this time, I didn’t even open it. I looked at the cover – a lurid illustration of a man and a woman tied up with scorpions crawling all over them – and thought, “Actually, that’s a great image. Why don’t I write a story for that one?”

Of course, I still needed a plot – beyond two people getting tied up and menaced by scorpions – and a hero to go with it. And this is where Todd Donovan suddenly emerged from the depths of my subconscious, cleared his throat and said, “That looks like a job for me.”

And since one of my rules for the July short story challenge is “Go along with whatever pops up, no matter how weird” I sent Todd on a quest to locate a missing scientist (who of course turns out to be a very attractive woman who also isn’t willing to take any macho crap neither from Todd nor the villain) only to find trouble in the form of a murderous druglord and his pit full of scorpions. I also decided to keep the story a period piece set in the mid 1960s.

With the July challenge stories, I normally try to keep research to a minimum. However, this story required some research beyond googling what coca plants actually look like. For starters, a pit full of deadly scorpions required a sufficiently lethal species of scorpion that made sense in the context and setting, since lethal scorpions that live in African or Asian deserts are not really suitable for a story that is set in a Latin American jungle. Finally, I did find a suitable species of scorpion, namely Tityus serrulatus, the Brazilian yellow scorpion, which even looks a little bit like the scorpions on the cover I used as inspiration. And since I had a pit full of lethal scorpions, I also needed to research what happens and what to do when someone gets stung.

That’s one of the benefits of writing. You learn all sorts of obscure facts when researching stories, which is why it baffles me when certain authors, usually of the literary persuasion, insist that they never do research, such as this dude who portrayed cellphones and e-mail as common in a novel set in the early 1990s and also relocated a town from Serbia to Croatia, which is kind of a massive faux pas, especially when the Balkan wars are one of the subjects of the novel.

Te next challenge was finding the right kind of cover for the story. Now the striking cover art of vintage men’s adventure magazines is largely impossible to recreate in the modern era without access to custom illustration. The look of men’s adventure paperbacks such as The Executioner or The Destroyer is also difficult to recreate in the modern era.

In the end, I combined influences from vintage paperbacks and German pulp magazines and found a stock photo of a young lady lying in the grass in clothes that fit both the description in the story and that also looked suitably vintage (too modern clothing and make-up is a curse when browsing stock photos). Of course, there were no scorpions, so I had to photoshop some in. Next came the typography, inspired by looking at the kind of fonts used on actual vintage magazines and paperbacks of the era, and finally some photoshopped grit for that beat up paperback look.

I think the result is pretty good, at least unless I can somehow resurrect Norm Eastman or Rafael DeSoto and persuade them to make covers for me.

Finally, do you remember that first Two-Fisted Todd story, the one I started and never finished? Well, in the wake of editing, proofing and publishing, I dug up that story again as well and found that what I’d written way back when still held up pretty well. What is more, I finished the story. It’s currently going through editing, so there will be at least one more Two-Fisted Todd adventure in the very near future. And then, who knows? After all, I have a big book full of artwork to serve as a potential inspiration for more adventures for Todd Donovan, freelance troubleshooter.

And for those of you who are not into retro pulp stuff, I also have more In Love and War stories coming up very soon (again, currently in editing) as well as at least one more Helen Shepherd Mystery as well as Murder in the Family 2 and After the End 2: More Stories of Life After the Apocalypse.

But for now, buckle up and follow Two-Fisted Todd Donovan into the jungle, as he faces…

The Crawling Death
The Crawling Death by Cora Buhlert1966. Freelance troubleshooter Todd Donovan is hired to locate Dr. Pat Turner, a biologist who has gone missing in the South American jungle. It seems like an easy job at first, but then Todd finds himself staring into the barrel of a gun.

Captured and taken to the jungle compound of the drug lord Durango, Todd finally meets up with Dr. Turner, who turns out to be not just a beautiful woman, but also Durango’s prisoner.

Durango is not the sort of man to leave potential witnesses alive. And so Todd and Dr. Pat Turner are soon facing a painful end in Durango’s pit of crawling death…

This is a short adventure story of approx. 5500 words or 20 pages in the style of the men’s adventure pulps of the 1960s.

More information.
Length: 5500 words
List price: 0.99 USD, EUR or GBP
Buy it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Netherlands, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Amazon Brazil, Amazon Japan, Amazon India, Amazon Mexico, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple iTunes, Google Play, Scribd, Smashwords, Inktera, Playster, Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel, Buecher.de, DriveThruFiction, Casa del Libro, e-Sentral, 24symbols and XinXii.

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Cora guestblogs elsewhere and remembers Ursula K. Le Guin

Posted on January 27, 2018 by Cora

First of all, my pals at the great podcast The Skiffy and Fanty Show are holding a “Month of Joy” event to celebrate the launch of their new website and they invited plenty of folks they interviewed over the years, including me, to share what gives them joy.

When I got the invitation e-mail, I was massively stressed out and didn’t feel particularly joyful. So I wondered what I could possibly write about, especially since very little gave me joy at that time. However, I found that no matter how stressed I was, I inevitably felt calmer when I sat down to make myself something to eat. So I decided to write about cooking.

The resulting post can be seen here. And coincidentally, I finally managed to recreate the elusive Schillerlocken salad mentioned in that post and you can see the result here. But I don’t just talk about cooking, but also a bit about writing. What is more, I share a genuine family recipe and holiday classic, namely my grandma’s recipe for herring salad. I wondered for a moment whether to share that particular recipe – it is a family legacy, after all – but then I thought why not. My Mom and I and possibly my cousin are the only people still making that particular recipe, so why not spread the joy of the best recipe for herring salad ever further?

So head over to the Skiffy and Fanty website, check out my post and maybe try the recipe. And while you’re there, read some of the other “Month of Joy” posts as well such as this one about translating Italian science fiction by Rachel Cordasco.

In other news, this was a sad week for the science fiction and fantasy community, because Ursula K. Le Guin, genre matriarch and grande old dame of science fiction and fantasy, left us at the age of 88. Over at the Speculative Fiction Showcase, I have linked to a number of lovely tributes from many of the big and small names in our genre in the weekly link round-up.

Those posts and tributes say pretty much everything there is to say about Ursula K. Le Guin and also show how important she was for our genre. So this isn’t going to be a long tribute, just a short rememberance.

When I fired up the Internet on Tuesday and saw that Ursula K. Le Guin had died, I was stunned, almost petrified. It shouldn’t be shocking, if someone dies at the age of 88, but she still seemed so active, still writing, still blogging, still publishing (her last essay collection, fittingly entitled No Time To Spare, came out barely a month before her death) that it seemed as if she would be here forever.

As with many other writers, readers and fans of science fiction and fantasy, Ursula K. Le Guin and her work have meant very much to me. However, when I saw someone asking others on Twitter, which was the first Ursula K. Le Guin book they read, I initially drew a blank. Which is odd, because for most of the other great writers of the genre, I can usually tell you which work of theirs I found first. But for Ursula K. Le Guin I honestly wasn’t sure.

Unlike many others, I never read A Wizard of Earthsea and its sequels as a teenager. When I grew up, science fiction and fantasy in general were scarce in supply in my school library and the village newsagent cum tobacco store cum stationery store cum bookstore. And as a young reader, you are very much dependent on the books that are available to you, particularly in the pre-Internet era. And in the 1980s, that meant “realistic” books that reflected the lives and problems of young people (though hardly any of those books ever reflected mine), not fantasy and science fiction. And what fantasy and science fiction there was, was usually be German or European authors. Books by American authors were rare, probably because of the vicious Anti-Americanism at the time (from both the right and the left) that meant anything American was automatically dismissed as trash. So I never read the Earthsea books as a kid, just as I never read Narnia or the Prydain Chronicles or A Wrinkle in Time or The Dark is Rising or the Oz books or Doctor Suess or plenty of other cultural touchstones for people from the English speaking world.

And when I finally discovered written science fiction at the age of fifteen, I found Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and Anne McCaffrey and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Poul Anderson and Robert A. Heinlein and C.J. Cherryh and many others, but I still did not find Ursula K. Le Guin. I knew that she existed, but for some reason – probably a lack of availability – I did not read anything by her until much later. Once I did, I read The Left Hand of Darkness and The Lathe of Heaven and The Dispossessed and enjoyed them all. I also finally read A Wizard of Earthsea and saw that I would have loved it, had I found it at the right time in my life. But most of all, I enjoyed her essays and her criticism. While I was working on my MA thesis, I thoroughly overdosed on science fiction criticism and could stomach neither science fiction criticism nor science fiction itself for a year or so. However, I still read any Ursula K. Le Guin essay or review I could find. Because unlike the preposterous blatherings of more or less preposterous men that I endured for my MA thesis, her work was always insightful and not preposterous at all.

So which was the first Ursula K. Le Guin work I read? Well, it turns out that there were two of her works that I read in my teens after all. One was “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, which I found in an anthology somewhere. But though it made an impact – well, is there anybody on whom that story doesn’t make an impact? – I did not recall the name of the author (it didn’t help that my teen self occasionally used what few bookstores carrying English language fiction there was as libraries, because I could not possibly afford to buy all the books that interested me) until I found it referenced in one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s essays much later. However, there is another work by Ursula K. Le Guin I encountered at around the same time, probably earlier, and that is The Word for World Is Forest. I suspect the reason I sought it out was because I saw it listed somewhere as an influence on the Endor scenes in Return of the Jedi. My teen self had made it her mission to track down each and everything that was supposed to have influenced the Star Wars trilogy. This quest led me to some strange places and to plenty of things where I could not see any connection at all, but it also introduced me to the films of Akira Kurosawa and the fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin.

So the first work by Ursula K Le Guin that I read was The Word for World Is Forest. I read it, because someone somewhere claimed it had influenced Return of the Jedi. I have no idea if it really did, though I can certainly see the parallels, but I’m still grateful to whatever critic drew that comparison, because they introduced me to one of the true greats of our genre.

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Star Trek Discovery – Now with even more Shocking Twists (TM) and a Side Order of Fried Rubberhead

Posted on January 26, 2018 by Cora

One of the many reasons I dislike Star Trek Discovery (for others, see here) is perhaps not entirely fair, since this is something entirely outside the control of anybody involved with the show. Because Star Trek Discovery premiered on the day of the disastrous German general elections of 2017 and my Twitter feed that night was half furious and terrified Germans talking about the elections and half Americans chatting about Star Trek Discovery, which means that I was not exactly positively inclined towards the show before I had even seen it. Though the show itself managed to surpass my worst expectations.

Ever since then, Star Trek Discovery has been something of a bad luck charm for me, since bad things tended to happen, whenever it aired, e.g. we were struck by a family crisis on the day of the last episode before the winter break aired. So when the Social-Democratic Party announced that they would hold their special party convention to take a vote on whether they could be bothered to govern on a day when Star Trek Discovery aired, I feared the worst. Because Star Trek Discovery is not just a bad show, it brings bad luck and the SPD is too wrapped up in their Germanness to notice, since they probably don’t even know what Star Trek Discovery is. Maybe someone should have pointed out that bad things tend to happen whenever a new episode of Tatort airs, since that also runs on a Sunday and is exactly the sort of German made programming these people will watch.

Alas, the SPD voted (narrowly) in favour of taking responsibility and actually governing rather than throwing yet another temper tantrum (though there are plenty of backbenchers indulging in temper tantrums of their own), so Star Trek Discovery might be shedding its status as a bad luck charm. Unfortunately, that does not make it a better show. Indeed, it’s as much an unholy mess as it ever was. Again, I’m not the only one who feels that way. Here is Katharine Trendacosta at io9 metaphorically hurling the show against the nearest wall.

A few episodes ago, I felt like Ms. Trendacosta, just furious at this pile of crap pretending to be a Star Trek show. But this week, my reaction is basically a version of the eight (or ten) deadly words: “I don’t give a fuck what happens to these people.”

Because I honestly no longer do. The few characters I actually cared about are either evil, dead, badly damaged or whatever once made me care about them is gone. And the characters still standing are pretty much the ones I didn’t care about in the first place. Star Trek Discovery prioritizes plot over character (and they actually had several interesting characters), only that their plots are neither original nor interesting and their shocking twists (TM) are telegraphed from a mile off. However, I largely follow serialised media like comics, TV shows, superhero movies, because I care about the characters. You can get me to follow a story purely for a cleverly constructed plot, but even then I tend to drop out, when there is just one stupid twist after another, unless I have become attached to the characters. And most of the others had better twists than Star Trek Discovery.

What is more, one thing that was constant across Star Trek in all its incarnations was that Star Trek was always character driven. You sat even through dreadful episodes (and every Star Trek had its share of those), because you liked those people and wanted to hang out with them and explore the universe. Star Trek Discovery, however, never gives you a cast of characters you just want to hang out with. It came close a few times just before the winter break, e.g. in the time-loop episode, but it always fell back again into its bad habits of just piling on shocking twists (TM) and emotional drama for the sake of it.

Star Trek Discovery isn’t Star Trek, it’s Dynasty in space, just like Game of Thrones is Dynasty with sword fights and dragons. Which can be fun for a while, but eventually gets tiring when the shocking twists (TM) are all there is.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut! Continue reading →

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Star Trek Discovery – The Anti Star Trek in the Mirror Universe

Posted on January 17, 2018 by Cora

Yes, it’s the weekly ranting and rambling blog post about Star Trek Discovery. Though at this point, I’m only still doing this, because I started it and want to do the entire first season (Previous editions may be found here). Because frankly, I’m sick of this show. It’s just one awful and depressing thing happening after another in a failed attempt to be deep and relevant “quality” television. I’m no longer even angry at the travesty that is Star Trek Discovery. At this point, my main feelings about the show are basically, “When will this torture be finally over?”

I’m clearly not the only one who feels like this, because several of the people to whose episode by episode reviews I used to link over at the Speculative Fiction Showcase have stopped doing them by now, either because their subscription to the streaming service which is the only way to see Discovery in the US ran out or because they just got sick of the whole thing and stopped watching. By now, the episode by episode reviewers left are mostly the big pop culture sites like Tor.com, io9, Den of Geek or The AV Club, where someone presumably gets paid for watching Star Trek Discovery and writing about it. But the for the love reviewers at smaller sites and personal blogs are largely gone. I can’t even blame them, because Star Trek Discovery is just a depressing mess with occasional glimpses of the much better show it could have been.

Because – as Camestros Felapton points out in his review of the latest episode – Star Trek Discovery just isn’t Star Trek and will never be Star Trek. It’s not even not Star Trek in the way the J.J. Abrams movies are not Star Trek – since those movies are basically generic space action movies coated with a thin veneer of Star Trek. But Discovery doesn’t even have that. It almost seems as if the Discovery showrunners, whoever they are this week (I seem to have lost track, since there are so many producers and executive producers and they also change frequently), go out of their way to make a show that is the polar opposite of Star Trek. Which, as I said last week, is something you can do and that several books and TV shows have done rather well. But if you want to do the opposite of Star Trek, then don’t call it Star Trek.

Spoilers behind the cut! Continue reading →

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Star Trek Discovery – Through the Looking Glass and into even more Grimdarkness

Posted on January 10, 2018 by Cora

The post title sums it up really. Star Trek Discovery is back and it’s as grimdark and depressing and un-Trek-like as ever in spite of liberally borrowing from Star Trek‘s most popular tropes.

If you’ve been following my Star Trek Discovery posts, you may remember that by the last couple of episode before the winter break, it seemed as if the show was improving. Well, it didn’t. Even worse, Star Trek Discovery seems hell-bent on destroying even the very few things about the show that actually worked.

As you may recall, when we last left Starfleet’s worst ship, crew and captain, they had just won a decisive victory in the war against the Klingons (well, they’ve had decisive victories before, considering that the tide of that particular war seems to turn every single episode), managed to destroy the Ship of the Dead, render the Klingon cloaking device useless, rescue Admiral Cornwell and take a high-ranking Klingon officer prisoner. So far, so good. Unfortunately, they also managed to fry the brain of their navigator and resident magic mushroom expert Paul Stamets, who promised to do “just one more jump” (a clearer case of famous last words were never uttered), one last jump which managed to land the Discovery somewhere else. Where exactly – past, future, gamma quadrant, delta quadrant, mirror universe, other parallel universe? – was not clear.

The answer to the mystery where the Discovery has landed after its last jump is one that is so utterly unpredictable that absolutely nobody could have seen it coming.

Warning! Spoilers behind the cut! Continue reading →

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“USS Callister” and the Successful Mutiny Against Toxic Masculinity

Posted on January 8, 2018 by Cora

A few days ago, I wrote a lengthy post about the treatment of mavericks and mutineers in recent science fiction, using the characters of Michael Burnham in Star Trek Discovery and Poe Dameron in The Last Jedi as examples (there’s also a detour into West German postwar cinema among other things, because I’m weird that way).

The main point was that both Michael Burnham and Poe Dameron, though normally loyal officers and typical hero material for their respective franchises, get into conflict with their respective superiors and find themselves pushed to the point of mutiny. In the past, both characters would have been proven right and their attempts at mutiny would have been forgiven, especially since we have seen plenty of characters do the same things Michael and Poe did in their respective franchises. However, both Michael and Poe are unlucky. Not only do their respective mutinies fail, both characters also pay dearly for what they did. Michael is tragically proven right and yet punished out of proportion for what she actually did and also considers herself wrongly responsible for the deaths of a whole lot of people, including her captain and a Starfleet admiral. Meanwhile, Poe Dameron is proven tragically wrong to such an extent that it’s obvious the plot is rigged against him, especially since a quick conversation could have cleared up Poe’s misunderstandings. Poe is also punished, though in proportion to the actual crime, and actually is indirectly responsible for the deaths of a whole lot of people, including a highly decorated Resistance vice admiral.

Star Trek Discovery uses its mutiny and punishment plot to initiate a redemption arc for a character who doesn’t really need one and also furthers its creepy focus on victory through pain and suffering. The Last Jedi uses its mutiny and punishment plot to make a point about individualism, toxic masculinity and the wisdom of older women. All of these are worthy points, The Last Jedi just doesn’t make them very well.

Viewed in isolation, I would have considered what happened to Michael Burnham and Poe Dameron merely bad plotting and an attempt to make a point that doesn’t work. However, two stories about heroic characters turning mutineer and failing miserably and getting punished appearing in two of science fiction’s biggest franchises, franchises which normally celebrate maverick heroes and heroines at that, so shortly after another seemed like a troubling pattern, particularly considering that there are plenty of voices already calling for more conformity, lest we ‘force’ the poor beleaguered regular people to vote for extremist parties, because everybody’s individualism is so very in their face.

Shortly after I wrote that post, however, I came across another filmic science fiction tale about a mutiny in space, a tale that’s part of a small franchise, but mimics one of science fiction’s biggest franchises. And this time around, the mutiny is successful.

I’m talking about “USS Callister”, an episode of the latest season of the British science fiction anthology series Black Mirror. There will be spoilers under the cut, so read on at your own peril: Continue reading →

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Culinary Archaeology: The Quest for Schillerlocken Salad

Posted on January 5, 2018 by Cora

As I mentioned in my Christmas post, I decided to forego the traditional herring salad for Christmas 2017, because it is a lot of work and with my Mom largely out of commission, I was stuck doing the holiday cooking/food preparation all on my own.

So I looked for something nice to serve for dinner on Christmas instead and suddenly remembered Schillerlocken salad, another fishy salad which my Mom occasionally made for festive occasions in the 1980s. I’d always liked this salad, plus it contains fewer ingredients than herring salad, so I thought, “Maybe I’ll make Schillerlocken salad instead.”

However, my quest to make Schillerlocken salad was doubly thwarted. For starters, my Mom had lost the recipe – at any rate, I couldn’t find it in the messy collection of magazine clippings stuffed into a notebook that my Mom uses as a recipe collection. My Mom also had no real memory of the salad (“Yeah, maybe I made something like that. I don’t really remember and it was a long time ago. No, I don’t know where the recipe is.”) and while the internet yielded a few recipes for Schillerlocken salad, none of them were even remotely close to what I remembered. So I had to recreate the ingredient list from memory.

The second obstacle I encountered in my quest to make Schillerlocken salad was more serious, because it turned out that the key ingredient, a type of smoked fish named Schillerlocke (named so, because it curls up like Friedrich Schiller’s ponytail, when smoked), had become nigh impossible to get, because the fish species in question, a type of shark called spiny dogfish, has become endangered due to overfishing, at least in the North Sea. Apparently, so I later learned on Twitter, spiny dogfish is still plentiful in North American coastal water to the point that Maine fishermen often discard it as bycatch, which seems like a collossal waste.

Still, you can’t make Schillerlocken salad without Schillerlocken and so I resigned myself to placing it on the list of foods I used to like a lot, but will probably never get to eat again, because it derives from an endangered species. Lady Curzon soup, a particular type of turtle soup, is another example. There are substitute recipes for Lady Curzon soup around (which I should really try some day, just to see if it still tastes as good as I remember) and you can still get turtle soup in Louisiana, made from non-endangered snapping turtles. But I haven’t even seen Lady Curzon soup on a menu in more than thirty years, let alone had it.

However, a few days ago, my abandoned quest for Schillerlocken salad took an unexpected turn, when I came across the elusive Schillerlocken after all, in the display of a Bremerhaven fish vendor. “Are those real Schillerlocken?” I asked the salesperson, who answered in the affirmative.

Now the fish vendor is a reputable company with its own smokehouse and restaurant, renowned for its high quality and sustainably fished products, so the Schillerlocken were not the result of dodgy pirate fishing ignoring fishing restrictions (in which case I wouldn’t have bought them). They or rather the spiky dogfish was likely imported from North America, where it’s not endangered. So I bought two Schillerlocken and got to have Schillerlocken salad after all.

Schillerlocken

Two Schillerlocken, fresh from the fishmonger

Of course, I still didn’t have the recipe, but I managed to cobble together a pretty good approximation of the ingredient list from memory, consisting of Schillerlocken, red bell pepper, tomatoes, spring onions, pickled celeriac, pickled cucumbers and pickled pearl onions in a sauce consisting of olive oil, red wine vinegar, ketchup, Dijon mustard, salt, pepper and a mix of dried herbs I like adding to salads.

I’m not sure how closely I managed to hit my Mom’s original recipe from the 1980s, but the result was delicious. I’ll definitely make it again, though only for special occasions. For starters, because the Schillerlocken are really pricey. They also apparently have a fairly high mercury content, so it’s not healthy to eat them too often, especially since I also still have two mercury containing tooth fillings from way back when.

Apparently, there is a Schillerlocken substitute called Goldlocken now, made from tilapia, so I may try making the salad with those to see if the taste and consistency are the same.

Schillerlocken salad

And here is the Schillerlocken salad. The matchstick shaped bits are pickled celeriac.

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A handy guide to all SFF-related posts and works of 2017

Posted on January 2, 2018 by Cora

I tend to feel uncomfortable with eligibility posts, but I posted such an overview for the first time last year, when someone added my name to the Hugo Nominations Wiki. And since I did it last year, I decided to make an overview post for 2017 as well.

So if you’re interested in what I write, here is an overview of all SFF related blogposts of 2017, in chronological order, as well as a list of the SFF fiction I published.

At this blog:

Elsewhere:

Fiction (SFF only):

Poetry:

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Happy New Year 2018

Posted on January 1, 2018 by Cora

2018 is about two hours old here in Germany. So first of all, a happy, healthy and successful 2018 to all of you and may it be better than the trashfire of a year that was 2017.

I spent New Year’s Eve at home with my parents, since my Mom still doesn’t feel well enough to go out. What is more, the restaurant where we usually went for New Year’s Eve the past couple of years has closed. And whatever desire I might have had to attend some of the big public parties, which was already close to zero, was further reduced by seeing the extreme security measures which make partying at the Brandenburg Gate look about as much fun as a visit to a maximum security prison. Besides, the fireworks are pretty good in our neighbourhood and require no security checks to view.

New year's eve decorations

A potted four-leaf clover plant and some good luck symbols for the new year.

For dinner, we had mussels. The broth for steaming the mussels is based on this recipe and was very flavourful. Though we didn’t serve the mussels with pasta, but just with baguette. The broth also makes a great soup a few days down the line.

Steamed mussels

Steamed North Sea mussels for dinner.

Champagne

And here is the champagne, ready for the new year to begin.

After drinking our champagne, we went outside for the fireworks. Well, my Dad and I went outside. Mom stayed indoors and watched from the window. Luckily, the rain stopped just in time for midnight. And because some of the people who’ve moved to my parents’ street in the meantime are enthusiastic igniters of fireworks, we had a great show.

Photographing fireworks is notoriously tricky, especially if you only have a smartphone camera, but I managed to catch some good shots:

Fireworks close-up

A close-up shot of fireworks.

Fireworks

The Russian family who moved into the house behind my parents are enthusiastic fireworkers.

Fireworks

And even more fireworks, courtesy of the Russian neighbours.

Fireworks

The people a bit down the street are enthusiastic fireworkers as well and apparently have a lot of money to spare for the 25 to 30 EUR a piece fireworks batteries.

Fireworks

And here is another look at a fireworks battery burning up in its full glory.

Smoking bush

No, the smoking bush is not the first miracle of 2018. Firework smoke simply got trapped in the foliage.

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