My Starship Cat Press Works
A comprehensive list of everything I've published under Starship Cat Press, all collected in one sticky posting.
Short Fiction
Spiral Horn, Spiral Tusk
A unicorn's horn for the king, a medal for the admiral -- but what for the lass who makes it possible?
Rissa possesses the dolphin-singer gift, which saved her life when the thief-taker found her. If she can guide the fleet to the white whale with the spiral tusk, she might win back her freedom.
But first she must return to land -- and the sea has become angry at her betrayal...
A short story of the Ixilon universe
Originally published in Beyond the Last Star: Stories from the Next Beginning, edited by Sherwood Smith.
Lunar Surface Blues
The High Frontier is no place for foolishness, but nature can always make a better idiot.
Four years ago, Molly's parents brought her up here to the Moon when their work brought them to Shepardsport. In the time since that move, she's earned her place here and a seat on this field trip. Only one problem -- she's been given the worst possible EVA partner.
A pencil-necked dweeb with an attitude, Benji wants to be one of the guys. But his stunts keep putting them both in danger, and the adults keep blaming Molly.
When Benji gets in over his head, can Molly save him before it costs both their lives?
A short story of the Grissom timeline.
A Hymn for Those Who Fall Forever
Endings always hurt, but Vitali Grigorenko never expected a nightmare in orbit.
Assigned to command the last flight of the orbiter Baikal, Vitali had started the mission in a nostalgic mood. That went out the airlock when he saw the body tumbling through space just beyond the flight deck windows. A body in NASA blue, not Russian tan.
Now he's trying to get to the bottom of a murder in space, and his own country's space program as much a hindrance as a help. It's becoming clear that politics is involved, on both sides of what used to be the Iron Curtain, and he's going to need to go clear to the top.
A short story of the Grissom timeline.
Rockin' the USA
It's not easy being married to the leader of the band, even in the best of times. When everything becomes political, you've got a nightmare on your hands.
Laurel had her doubts when her husband signed on to headline Governor Thorne's Independence Day concert in Candlestick Park. Now that the band's committed to the appearance, the Flannigan Administration has decided to shut the show down, with prejudice.
Laurel knows she has to fight this attempt to stop the signal. But doing so may put her in more danger than she could ever have anticipated, and risk those she loves.
A short story of the Grissom timeline, originally published in Liberty Island Magazine.
This edition also includes a bonus essay on the era of dictatorship in Grissom-timeline America.
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The Angry Astronaut Affair
It only takes a spark to start a raging inferno.
One sharply-worded post online, and now Reginald Waite has a flamewar on his hands. A welcome distraction from the frustrations of preparing for a technically demanding spac emission -- or so he thought.
The conflict just kept spiraling, until it attracted the attention of higher-ups. Now Reggie's looking at serious trouble.
A short story of the Grissom timeline, originally published at Liberty Island Magazine.
This edition includes a bonus essay on the Space Race in the Grissom timeline.
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The Day the War Struck Home
Astronaut Peter Caudell comes home to find his daughter struggling with a school assignment. She's to write an essay for Memorial Day, and her teacher suggested astronauts -- but she wants to write about combat heroes, not REMF's. So Peter suggests the NASA Massacre and relates his own part in those events.
It's the summer of 1994, and the Energy Wars are raging in the Middle East. On the home front it's the Summer of Fear, a season of continual terrorist attacks. All eyes are upon Kennedy Space Center, where a Space Shuttle is launching for a critical on-orbit repair of a spy satellite. When it goes up without a hitch, everyone breathes a sigh of relief.
However, the intelligence proves incomplete -- the actual target is Johnson Space Center. Suddenly Peter is in the fight of his life, as the presence of multiple police agencies further complicates the fight to stop the terrorists from slaughtering the astronaut corps.
It's a story of courage, patriotism and self-sacrifice that proves a much greater lesson than the teacher imagined.
A short story of the Grissom timeline.
Originally published in Liberty Island Magazine as an Honorable Mention for the Memorial Day contest. This version includes a bonus essay on the genesis of the Energy Wars.
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Once a Chekist
Katya Burinskaya carries a deadly secret. So when she is summoned to the Lubyanka for a personal meeting with the head of Imperial Security, she fears the worst.
However, this meeting does not concern her, but her daughter. Tasha has become entangled with a troublesome genomic prince of the Imperial House, and both mother and daughter may suffer if Katya does not assist Security Minister Chalkov in investigating a family affair of his own, which also involves Prince Yevgenny Yakovlevich.
Politics makes strange bedfellows in the new Russian Empire born of human cloning and Cold War genetic experiments. Chalkov was once an officer of the old Soviet KGB. And as Katya's husband often warns, once a Chekist, always a Chekist.
A short story of the Grissom timeline.
Originally published in the anthology Mortis Operandi.
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A Gift of Koi
Ancient and wise, the grandfather Koi knows at first sight that this human bears a hidden wound. But how can a mere fish, even one as old as himself, be of any aid to a human?
Astronaut Tyler Lanham had come to Grissom City, first and oldest lunar settlement, in search of the medical expertise he couldn't find on the far side of the Moon. When he sees the scar on the ancient koi's side, he knows he's found a kindred spirit.
But an enemy is stalking these lovely gardens. A danger that will change both man and fish.
A short story of the Grissom timeline.
Technoserf
The Madrian Empire rules worlds as numerous as the grains of sand on a beach. When the Madrians conquered Roby's homeworld, they brought him to this godforsaken lump of a world, to toil at their will.
Now the Gate has failed, leaving them without communications or transport to the rest of the Empire. When Roby identifies the problem, he's offered a chance to fix it.
Roby now faces a quandry. Even if he can repair the damage, should he? Will he be better off reunited with the masters' metropole? Or will he only complicate a difficult life?
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Red Star, Yellow Sign
Whom the gods would destroy, they first drive mad.
It's 1934, and the assassination of Sergei Kirov, Leningrad's Communist Party chief, has rocked the Soviet Union. When an up and coming young Party official is assigned to investigate, it looks like an open and shut case.
The further Nikolai Yezhov looks into the case, the stranger things become. Mysterious entities lie beneath the swamps upon which Leningrad was founded. Because he has stumbled upon these secrets older than humanity itself, Yezhov must be eliminated. But first he must be led to commit acts that will ensure that history will forever remember him as a vicious criminal.
The Secret of Pad 34
Who would put a ceiling on humanity's expansion into space?
That's what Gus Grissom wants to know. While fishing offshore from Cape Canaveral, he glimpses a mysterious undersea city of unearthly geometries, marked with a strange three-armed cross symbol.
His efforts to research it bring him veiled threats from strangers at his door. Trouble blights an exemplary career. However, Gus refuses to be cowed into silence, and pursues every lead he can find.
HP Lovecraft wrote that we live on a placid island of ignorance and were not meant to travel far. This is the Space Race in a world where the Soviet Union is not our only adversary.
Time Slips
What if our most treasured verities were in fact wrong?
To be selected for Project Mercury and be one of America's first astronauts was a dream come true for test pilot Deke Slayton. But fellow Mercury astronaut Al Shepard kept telling old stories from his native New England, tales of monstrous entities like Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth. Earlier generations had viewed them as demons, but might they in fact be aliens, here long before humanity?
Soon Deke discovers evidence that something is watching the US space program. Something that begrudges humanity the stars and would put a ceiling on human attainment. Something that can manipulate time itself.
HP Lovecraft wrote that we dwell on a placid island of ignorance amidst the dark ocean of infinity, and that we were not meant to travel far.
What might the US space program have looked like in a cosmos filled with hostile eldritch entities? Would they notice us as playthings? Or as a nuisance to be dealt with?
Bringing Home Major Tom
Sandy didn't believe in wishes.
Walking home one evening, she saw a bright star shining over the abandoned Starlite Motel and made a wish. Purely as a lark, of course -- she never expected anything to come of it.
Now she's dealing with a man who claims to be from another world where history ran differently. He wants to go back home -- but Stacey has no idea how to go about it.
Tell Me a Story
Storytelling is as old as humanity. Given the importance of reading to children in their intellectual development, it is certain that we will take the storytelling tradition with us into space as we build permanent settlements beyond Earth.
As one generation after another take a beloved childhood story further from Earth, it is seen in new ways by children for whom the pre-spaceflight view of the Moon is increasingly alien.
Originally published in the anthology Rocket Science, edited by Ian Sales.
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The Baying of the Hounds
In the world we know, Nikola Tesla's Wardencliffe experiment proved a costly failure and was ultimately torn down for scrap. But what if things had gone differently and he pressed his work to completion?
In a world similar to but unlike our own, Tesla completes his transmission tower. But when he turns it on, he discovers his calculations were incomplete. Some unknown factor has created a connection with another world with physical laws unlike our own. The commingling of curved and angular space has led to catastrophe.
Now his greatest rival, Thomas Alva Edison, compels him to repair the damage. To do so, Tesla must make his way through a ruined city to the locus of the damage. And through his mind echoes the baying of unseen hounds.
A short story originally published in the anthology Steampunk Cthulhu.
Phoenix in the Machine
Dreams come true in cyberspace -- but so do nightmares.
Roger remembers dying in a fire on the launchpad. He's reconciled it with being alive again. However, being an infomorph in a simulated environment has been a difficult adjustment. Toni tells him he went mad the first time he awoke, and she had to crash the computer.
Now he helps her playtest the games her employer designs. But cyberspace outside Toni's local area network is a dangerous place. A disastrous experiment in Bangladesh left the world in a moral panic about AI and machine consciousness.
When a careless connection betrays him to those who cannot distinguish between an AI and a post-biological human being, he and Toni must flee. Their cross-country journey will either destroy him or deliver him the spaceflight he's awaited for a century.
Beach House on the Moon
The Moon is a dead world, airless and desolate. Emmaline Waite has known this fact since childhood, when she watched the Apollo landings.
But here she sits on the shores of the Sea of Tranquillity, looking up at the gibbous Earth as the waves roll in. What madness can this be?
She gets no time to contemplate that question, for she is not alone. She is about to enter a realm of love and fear, of mindbending secrets that change her understanding of human history, and of self-sacrifice.
Her life will never be the same.
Phoenix Dreams
In Greek myth, the phoenix is a bird that rises from its own ashes. Growing up in the city named for it, Toni knew the story well, and her experience with computer games made her comfortable with the idea of death being negotiable. So when she found a cache of old space memorabilia in her grandfather's attic, she never guessed that her eagerness to right a historic wrong would meet with such ferocious opposition.
But it only made her more determined to give this man his spaceflight, even a century late. She would learn the skills, develop the code, and do whatever it took.
The Shadow of a Dead God
What secrets lie beneath an alien world?
A routine archeological dig on a world once ruled by the mysterious Star Tyrants. For Moon-born Liu Shang, working on a planetary surface might be unsettling, but she could manage -- until the dreams started.
Unwilling to drag others into a harebrained search, she headed out alone, contrary to mission rules. Just as she was about to give up, she found an unlikely artifact.
Handling it connects her to the mind of a long-ago rebel against the Star Tyrants' rule. Nothing will ever be the same.
A short story.
The Moon Mirror
Chelsea Ayles dreamed of going to the Moon since she was a child. Now her dream job at NASA has turned into a nightmare, thanks to those many blood-sucking arachnids. Yeah, politics, as in a Senator accusing her of destroying America's priceless heritage because she chose the moonrocks that were used to make a proof-of-concept mirror segment for a lunar telescope project. Now the mirror sits in her office like a bitter mockery of what might have been -- until the day her reflection turns into a handsome stranger who calls himself the Man in the Moon and offers her visions of a world that might have been. Visions that ignite a longing of an intensity she hasn't known since she was in grade school and watched videos of the Apollo lunar missions in science class.
All the Little Hedgehogs
In Soviet Union, genetic engineering does you.
Yona wondered why everyone kept steering him toward a military career, until one of his teachers noticed his aptitude for genetics. Now he's the personal student of Academician Voronsky, working in a secret genetic engineering facility in a closed town.
However, Yona keeps having to spend as much time babysitting the Academician's adopted son Kolya as actually doing genetics. When this extra assignment becomes a frustration, Yona learns just how quickly privileges can be retracted.
And then he starts learning just how deep the secrets of the Soviet human genetics program really goes.
A story from the Grissom timeline (Gus on the Moon universe).
Caution: Contains intense material that may be disturbing to some readers. Reader discretion advised.
Love in the Time of Campaigning
As Frank Correra brings his family to a lunar settlement to get them away from a worsening political situation on Earth, he reminisces about how he and his wife met.
Frank had always dreamed of the skies. As a clone of an astronaut who subsequently became a US Senator, Frank thought he had a clear path ahead of him. But when it comes time to apply for the Air Force Academy, it is an election year. His ur-brother can't promise a nomination until he's won another term, and this year promises a hard race to run. When the other side puts up an ugly attack ad, can Frank find a way to discredit it before it destroys his ur-brother's chance of re-election, and with it Frank's slot at an Academy appointment?
Starlight Running
Eight lives depend on Kyle's desperate trek across the Moon to get help. But someone -- or something -- intends for him to fail. Can he defeat it in time?
She Dreams Day and Night
Nancy White they called her, a good, solid name for a troubled girl. But she knew her father had called her by another name, before he disappeared through the gate into another world of strange stars and stranger moons. No matter how hard the staff of Hildred House try to force her to forget, she remembers. And longs to reopen the gate, to rejoin her father on that alien shore where cloud-waves break.
The Other Side of Midnight
Life has been a nightmare for Mitya ever since he was arrested on trumped-up charges and exiled to Siberia. But this labor camp in the far north of Magadan Oblast hides a secret far more terrible than the merely human evils of the Great Terror. For the universe we know is not the only one, and there are places where it interpenetrates with universes where the laws of nature as we know them do not operate, where humanity has no place. Worlds inhabited by beings ancient and terrible, to whom humanity are slaves, playthings, food.
The Shadow over Leningrad
In Stalin's Soviet Union, Tikhon Grigoriev lives a precarious life. He knows too much. He's seen too much. A single misstep could destroy him, and if he stumbles, he will take his family down with him. With Leningrad besieged by Nazi armies, the danger has only increased.
He's not a man who wants to come to the notice of those in high places. But when he solved a murder that seemed supernatural, impossible, he attracted the attention of Leningrad's First Party Secretary.
So when a plot of land grows vegetables of unusual size and vigor, and anyone who eats them goes mad, who should be called upon to solve the mystery but Tikhon Grigoriev. However, these secrets could get him far worse than a bullet in the head. For during the White Nights the boundaries between worlds grow thin, and in some of those worlds humanity can have no place.
Perfect Darkness
What would perfect darkness look like? And what would happen if you saw it?
When Pavlik becomes obsessed with the idea of seeing perfect darkness, it becomes a distraction from the pod's duty as asteroid miners. Little does he know that danger lies in opening one's mind to the things that lurk in perfect darkness. Things that endanger his pod-brothers, even all of Briar's Children.
Vengeance is Mine
Chance spared Bina when the Sand Locusts destroyed the village of her birth. Determination kept her alive in the years that followed.
But survival has come at a price. Each day she lives among her captors, she must ignore the signs that their nameless god is not a force of law and justice.
City of Blinding Light
The Columbian Exposition has transformed Chicago into a vision of the bright shining future. However, the electric lights that turn night to day bring no joy to Kitty Hawthorne, and not just because they are the work of her employer's chief rival. Now Edison wants her to abandon her investigation of Tesla's alternating current system and look into a mysterious newcomer. Who is Samuel Gillian, who devises calculating machinery as easily as he builds flying machines?
Grandmaster's Gambit
The disastrous war of 1913 is over, and young journalist Isaak Babel has used his fame as a war correspondent to win a peacetime job covering an international chess tournament in New York City. However, trouble is aboard the airship Grossdeuschland, in the form of the notorious Bolshevik terrorist Koba and his henchmen. Men with a dark plan, and New York City will not welcome their visit
The Wonderful Traveling Medicine Show
Surrounded by a family who were happy with life in their West Virginia mining town, Janeen struggled against the pressure to keep her head down and conform. A dreamer, everyone said, Just like her father. And look what that got him, dead in the Turkish war. But Janeen knew she was meant for a wider world, and one day it came to her in the form of a broken-down steamer and its mysterious owner.
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The Sound of One Child Crying
Who is the child Reza can hear crying every time she goes to the new addition to the Royal Library? Her boss insists there is no child, that it is nothing more than her uncanny sensitivity to the unseen world making a nuisance of itself.
Worse, searching for answers gets her angry rebukes about respect for the dead. The further Reza goes, the more certain she becomes that someone is hiding an ugly secret.
It's a secret that traces back two generations, to a dark period in this land's history. A time most people would prefer to forget, not caring that denial doesn't make a problem go away.
The truth may set you free, but not without a price. And Reza fears that death itself might turn out to be an easier price than the one demanded of her.
Ice Storm
Everywhere Evangeline looks, a thin coating of ice makes objects gleam in the sunlight. However, the beauty proves deceptive, for it hides a deadly secret, one only she can recognize.
In her youth, Evangeline had aspired ot master the powerful magics of her world. Those dreams died the day her Gift awakened uncontrolled and plunged her into a vision of a full fleet battle. The Admiral's Gift will not be denied, and for Evangeline there was no choice but to trade her mage's robes for Navy blue.
Now she is faced with an enemy she cannot fight save by magic. Except those who bear the Admiral's gift are forever barred from working magic.
The Wolf and the Well-Tempered Clavier
With the coronation fast approaching, the Cathedral of St. George the Dragonslayer cannot afford trouble. But come it does, while the cathedral choir director is at the Dragon's Breath Organ, practicing the anthem he wrote at King William's own request. While explaining some technical terms to his understudy, the choir director decides to show off a little.
In the process, he releases an ancient menace from long before humanity came through the worldgate to this place. An entity that strikes him blind, and threatens further harm to anyone who tries to play the Dragon's Breath Organ.
However, they dare not disappoint His Majesty, not on the most momentous day of his reign. Someone must cleanse the Dragon's Breath Organ of this malicious entity, and the choir director cannot. So the task falls to Miss Anne Teesdale, understudy organist.
Now she must delve into the history of the cathedral, and the mysterious ancient magic that fills the organ's windchest. A secret that may well cost this young woman her life.
Or worse, her sanity.
The Stirge
When Liphrel's family fell too far on their debts, he was sold to the priests of the death god. But his family were followers of the birth goddess, which left him in a difficult position.
Novels
The War That Came to Houston
In the midst of preparations for a critical mission, Leland Andersen can't afford the return of a childhood nightmare. Yet night after night the vision torments him, of an astronaut dying in flames.
Nora McKinzie is a Houston police officer -- and a member of an ancient order founded to fight eldritch entities wherever they might flee. When she receives a warning that a sworn enemy is on the move again, her obligations come into conflict with each other.
Both of them are present when Johnson Space Center comes under attack by terrorists. And they both know that the official explanations don't hold together.
Two people, one deadly secret -- and an enemy from beyond time and space.
A novel of the Grissom timeline.
Previously serialized under the title A Separate War.
Also available at a variety of online bookstores and subscription services.
Khuldhar's War
The war was over, but where was the peace the victors had promised?
Geidliv the Tyrant was dead, and the rogue nation of Karmandios now lay in ruins, its people prostrate before the occupying armies of the five allied nations. But now the winners are quarreling among themselves, and where brothers fight, enemies will enter to widen the gap.
Merekhet is a man torn between competing loyalties, tormented by guilt over his past failures. Raised the scion of a Karmandi noble family, he discovered upon puberty that he was in fact the son of a senior war commander of the telepathic People of the Hawk. Yet he could not entirely disavow his mother's people, and thus became entangled in Geidliv's regime and his nephew Khuldhar's doomed attempt to fight it.
Now Merekhet has evidence that Geidliv used telepathy and the bioscience of the mer-people to create a living weapon from Khuldhar's genetic material and hid it in plain sight. Worse, a former ally now estranged is seeking that weapon, and must not be allowed to capture it, lest all the world of Okeanos fall to far greater tyranny than Geidliv could ever have hoped to create.
Merekhet must regain Khuldhar's confidence, and together they must find the five young men who are the keys to Geidliv's final vengeance weapon.
The Workhouse War
An afternoon for sketching in peace - that was all Nadine Darby wanted. She thought she was taking a shortcut to get past an overgrown levee and gain a better view of the Mississippi for some landscape work. Instead she ended up somewhere else. A place called Elyssium, where the past walks alongside the present. Where you can see a modern car pull up and a Confederate Navy officer climb out, talking on a cellphone.
On the riverbank Nadine met a strange little man who told her he was an artist as well, and showed her his sketchbook to prove it. But no sooner had Nadine made her first friend than she discovered all was not well. She watched in helpless horror as a young man was pursued, arrested and beaten by thugs from an institution that goes by the official name of the City Orphanage, but is generally called the Workhouse by the inhabitants of Port of White Fleet.
Nadine can count herself fortunate that she fell into the company of a man who has little use for this organization. But his efforts to help her attain her artistic ambitions instead attract the attention she must avoid, and draws her into quarrels that have simmered for decades.
Can Nadine thread her way through the myriad perils of this world and save herself and her new-found friends? And even if she defeats the Workhouse, will it be at the cost of losing everything she's found here?
Collections
The Margins of Mundania
A tween boy's Christmas gift opens a world of wonder and brings joy to a whole town fallen on hard times. A young New Englander in the early Twentieth Century discovers that some parts of human history don't bear too close examination. A literary critic in the old Soviet Union must confront his own moral cowardice.
These stories, along with a multitude of bite-sized works of flash fiction, carry you from the most prosaic of events to the moments of awe that offer glimpses of matters larger than ourselves.
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The Space Race Trilogy Omnibus: Time Slips, The Secret of Pad 34, Beach House on the Moon, Plus two exclusive new essays
All three books of the Space Race Trilogy, now together with two exclusive new essays.
Time Slips
What if our most treasured verities were in fact wrong?
To be selected for Project Mercury and be one of America's first astronauts was a dream come true for test pilot Deke Slayton. But fellow Mercury astronaut Al Shepard kept telling old stories from his native New England, tales of monstrous entities like Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth. Earlier generations had viewed them as demons, but might they in fact be aliens, here long before humanity?
Soon Deke discovers evidence that something is watching the US space program. Something that begrudges humanity the stars and would put a ceiling on human attainment. Something that can manipulate time itself.
HP Lovecraft wrote that we dwell on a placid island of ignorance amidst the dark ocean of infinity, and that we were not meant to travel far.
What might the US space program have looked like in a cosmos filled with hostile eldritch entities? Would they notice us as playthings? Or as a nuisance to be dealt with?
The Secret of Pad 34
Who would put a ceiling on humanity's expansion into space?
That's what Gus Grissom wants to know. While fishing offshore from Cape Canaveral, he glimpses a mysterious undersea city of unearthly geometries, marked with a strange three-armed cross symbol.
His efforts to research it bring him veiled threats from strangers at his door. Trouble blights an exemplary career. However, Gus refuses to be cowed into silence, and pursues every lead he can find.
HP Lovecraft wrote that we live on a placid island of ignorance and were not meant to travel far. This is the Space Race in a world where the Soviet Union is not our only adversary.
Beach House on the Moon
The Moon is a dead world, airless and desolate. Emmaline Waite has known this fact since childhood, when she watched the Apollo landings.
But here she sits on the shores of the Sea of Tranquillity, looking up at the gibbous Earth as the waves roll in. What madness can this be?
She gets no time to contemplate that question, for she is not alone. She is about to enter a realm of love and fear, of mind-bending secrets that change her understanding of human history, and of self-sacrifice.
Her life will never be the same.
Miskatonic University in the Cold War and Contemporary Era
How would H.P. Lovecraft's famous fictional institution of higher education have developed through the second half of the Twentieth Century and into the Twenty-first?
Space: Gernsback vs. Lovecraft
A look at the fundamental worldviews underlying the approaches of Hugo Gernsback and H.P. Lovecraft to the portrayal of outer space, aliens, and space travel.
Non-Fiction
The History of the Implementation of the Library Computer System (LCS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Originally the author's thesis for a master's degree at Illinois State University, this work examines the history fo library automation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from the earliest beginnings through the implementation of the Library Computer System (LCS) under the leadership of Hugh Atkinson to the creation of the ILLINET Online (IO) system. All of the chainges are studied in teh contest of the Illinois Board of Higher education (IBHE) mandate for library resource sharing throughout Illinois' academic libraries to reduce expenditures while maintaining quality scholarship and education, and of the effects these changes had on library services to the user population.
The process of implementing LCS is studied to show the way in which the library administration handled the various crises as they arose and what effects these decisions had on the long-term structure of the system. Following implementation, it continues to study the subsequent developments of the online computer system to increase service to the library's users. In addition, three doctoral dissertation are examined which used LCS as a research tool for the study of collection and use patterns in academic libraries. Finally, the author examines the results of automation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the context of the academic community and the state of Illinois at large, and draws conclusions from them.
Now also available in a paperback edition:
Short Fiction
Spiral Horn, Spiral Tusk
A unicorn's horn for the king, a medal for the admiral -- but what for the lass who makes it possible?
Rissa possesses the dolphin-singer gift, which saved her life when the thief-taker found her. If she can guide the fleet to the white whale with the spiral tusk, she might win back her freedom.
But first she must return to land -- and the sea has become angry at her betrayal...
A short story of the Ixilon universe
Originally published in Beyond the Last Star: Stories from the Next Beginning, edited by Sherwood Smith.
Lunar Surface Blues
The High Frontier is no place for foolishness, but nature can always make a better idiot.
Four years ago, Molly's parents brought her up here to the Moon when their work brought them to Shepardsport. In the time since that move, she's earned her place here and a seat on this field trip. Only one problem -- she's been given the worst possible EVA partner.
A pencil-necked dweeb with an attitude, Benji wants to be one of the guys. But his stunts keep putting them both in danger, and the adults keep blaming Molly.
When Benji gets in over his head, can Molly save him before it costs both their lives?
A short story of the Grissom timeline.
A Hymn for Those Who Fall Forever
Endings always hurt, but Vitali Grigorenko never expected a nightmare in orbit.
Assigned to command the last flight of the orbiter Baikal, Vitali had started the mission in a nostalgic mood. That went out the airlock when he saw the body tumbling through space just beyond the flight deck windows. A body in NASA blue, not Russian tan.
Now he's trying to get to the bottom of a murder in space, and his own country's space program as much a hindrance as a help. It's becoming clear that politics is involved, on both sides of what used to be the Iron Curtain, and he's going to need to go clear to the top.
A short story of the Grissom timeline.
Rockin' the USA
It's not easy being married to the leader of the band, even in the best of times. When everything becomes political, you've got a nightmare on your hands.
Laurel had her doubts when her husband signed on to headline Governor Thorne's Independence Day concert in Candlestick Park. Now that the band's committed to the appearance, the Flannigan Administration has decided to shut the show down, with prejudice.
Laurel knows she has to fight this attempt to stop the signal. But doing so may put her in more danger than she could ever have anticipated, and risk those she loves.
A short story of the Grissom timeline, originally published in Liberty Island Magazine.
This edition also includes a bonus essay on the era of dictatorship in Grissom-timeline America.
Also available from:
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The Angry Astronaut Affair
It only takes a spark to start a raging inferno.
One sharply-worded post online, and now Reginald Waite has a flamewar on his hands. A welcome distraction from the frustrations of preparing for a technically demanding spac emission -- or so he thought.
The conflict just kept spiraling, until it attracted the attention of higher-ups. Now Reggie's looking at serious trouble.
A short story of the Grissom timeline, originally published at Liberty Island Magazine.
This edition includes a bonus essay on the Space Race in the Grissom timeline.
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The Day the War Struck Home
Astronaut Peter Caudell comes home to find his daughter struggling with a school assignment. She's to write an essay for Memorial Day, and her teacher suggested astronauts -- but she wants to write about combat heroes, not REMF's. So Peter suggests the NASA Massacre and relates his own part in those events.
It's the summer of 1994, and the Energy Wars are raging in the Middle East. On the home front it's the Summer of Fear, a season of continual terrorist attacks. All eyes are upon Kennedy Space Center, where a Space Shuttle is launching for a critical on-orbit repair of a spy satellite. When it goes up without a hitch, everyone breathes a sigh of relief.
However, the intelligence proves incomplete -- the actual target is Johnson Space Center. Suddenly Peter is in the fight of his life, as the presence of multiple police agencies further complicates the fight to stop the terrorists from slaughtering the astronaut corps.
It's a story of courage, patriotism and self-sacrifice that proves a much greater lesson than the teacher imagined.
A short story of the Grissom timeline.
Originally published in Liberty Island Magazine as an Honorable Mention for the Memorial Day contest. This version includes a bonus essay on the genesis of the Energy Wars.
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Once a Chekist
Katya Burinskaya carries a deadly secret. So when she is summoned to the Lubyanka for a personal meeting with the head of Imperial Security, she fears the worst.
However, this meeting does not concern her, but her daughter. Tasha has become entangled with a troublesome genomic prince of the Imperial House, and both mother and daughter may suffer if Katya does not assist Security Minister Chalkov in investigating a family affair of his own, which also involves Prince Yevgenny Yakovlevich.
Politics makes strange bedfellows in the new Russian Empire born of human cloning and Cold War genetic experiments. Chalkov was once an officer of the old Soviet KGB. And as Katya's husband often warns, once a Chekist, always a Chekist.
A short story of the Grissom timeline.
Originally published in the anthology Mortis Operandi.
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A Gift of Koi
Ancient and wise, the grandfather Koi knows at first sight that this human bears a hidden wound. But how can a mere fish, even one as old as himself, be of any aid to a human?
Astronaut Tyler Lanham had come to Grissom City, first and oldest lunar settlement, in search of the medical expertise he couldn't find on the far side of the Moon. When he sees the scar on the ancient koi's side, he knows he's found a kindred spirit.
But an enemy is stalking these lovely gardens. A danger that will change both man and fish.
A short story of the Grissom timeline.
Technoserf
The Madrian Empire rules worlds as numerous as the grains of sand on a beach. When the Madrians conquered Roby's homeworld, they brought him to this godforsaken lump of a world, to toil at their will.
Now the Gate has failed, leaving them without communications or transport to the rest of the Empire. When Roby identifies the problem, he's offered a chance to fix it.
Roby now faces a quandry. Even if he can repair the damage, should he? Will he be better off reunited with the masters' metropole? Or will he only complicate a difficult life?
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Red Star, Yellow Sign
Whom the gods would destroy, they first drive mad.
It's 1934, and the assassination of Sergei Kirov, Leningrad's Communist Party chief, has rocked the Soviet Union. When an up and coming young Party official is assigned to investigate, it looks like an open and shut case.
The further Nikolai Yezhov looks into the case, the stranger things become. Mysterious entities lie beneath the swamps upon which Leningrad was founded. Because he has stumbled upon these secrets older than humanity itself, Yezhov must be eliminated. But first he must be led to commit acts that will ensure that history will forever remember him as a vicious criminal.
The Secret of Pad 34
Who would put a ceiling on humanity's expansion into space?
That's what Gus Grissom wants to know. While fishing offshore from Cape Canaveral, he glimpses a mysterious undersea city of unearthly geometries, marked with a strange three-armed cross symbol.
His efforts to research it bring him veiled threats from strangers at his door. Trouble blights an exemplary career. However, Gus refuses to be cowed into silence, and pursues every lead he can find.
HP Lovecraft wrote that we live on a placid island of ignorance and were not meant to travel far. This is the Space Race in a world where the Soviet Union is not our only adversary.
Time Slips
What if our most treasured verities were in fact wrong?
To be selected for Project Mercury and be one of America's first astronauts was a dream come true for test pilot Deke Slayton. But fellow Mercury astronaut Al Shepard kept telling old stories from his native New England, tales of monstrous entities like Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth. Earlier generations had viewed them as demons, but might they in fact be aliens, here long before humanity?
Soon Deke discovers evidence that something is watching the US space program. Something that begrudges humanity the stars and would put a ceiling on human attainment. Something that can manipulate time itself.
HP Lovecraft wrote that we dwell on a placid island of ignorance amidst the dark ocean of infinity, and that we were not meant to travel far.
What might the US space program have looked like in a cosmos filled with hostile eldritch entities? Would they notice us as playthings? Or as a nuisance to be dealt with?
Bringing Home Major Tom
Sandy didn't believe in wishes.
Walking home one evening, she saw a bright star shining over the abandoned Starlite Motel and made a wish. Purely as a lark, of course -- she never expected anything to come of it.
Now she's dealing with a man who claims to be from another world where history ran differently. He wants to go back home -- but Stacey has no idea how to go about it.
Tell Me a Story
Storytelling is as old as humanity. Given the importance of reading to children in their intellectual development, it is certain that we will take the storytelling tradition with us into space as we build permanent settlements beyond Earth.
As one generation after another take a beloved childhood story further from Earth, it is seen in new ways by children for whom the pre-spaceflight view of the Moon is increasingly alien.
Originally published in the anthology Rocket Science, edited by Ian Sales.
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The Baying of the Hounds
In the world we know, Nikola Tesla's Wardencliffe experiment proved a costly failure and was ultimately torn down for scrap. But what if things had gone differently and he pressed his work to completion?
In a world similar to but unlike our own, Tesla completes his transmission tower. But when he turns it on, he discovers his calculations were incomplete. Some unknown factor has created a connection with another world with physical laws unlike our own. The commingling of curved and angular space has led to catastrophe.
Now his greatest rival, Thomas Alva Edison, compels him to repair the damage. To do so, Tesla must make his way through a ruined city to the locus of the damage. And through his mind echoes the baying of unseen hounds.
A short story originally published in the anthology Steampunk Cthulhu.
Phoenix in the Machine
Dreams come true in cyberspace -- but so do nightmares.
Roger remembers dying in a fire on the launchpad. He's reconciled it with being alive again. However, being an infomorph in a simulated environment has been a difficult adjustment. Toni tells him he went mad the first time he awoke, and she had to crash the computer.
Now he helps her playtest the games her employer designs. But cyberspace outside Toni's local area network is a dangerous place. A disastrous experiment in Bangladesh left the world in a moral panic about AI and machine consciousness.
When a careless connection betrays him to those who cannot distinguish between an AI and a post-biological human being, he and Toni must flee. Their cross-country journey will either destroy him or deliver him the spaceflight he's awaited for a century.
Beach House on the Moon
The Moon is a dead world, airless and desolate. Emmaline Waite has known this fact since childhood, when she watched the Apollo landings.
But here she sits on the shores of the Sea of Tranquillity, looking up at the gibbous Earth as the waves roll in. What madness can this be?
She gets no time to contemplate that question, for she is not alone. She is about to enter a realm of love and fear, of mindbending secrets that change her understanding of human history, and of self-sacrifice.
Her life will never be the same.
Phoenix Dreams
In Greek myth, the phoenix is a bird that rises from its own ashes. Growing up in the city named for it, Toni knew the story well, and her experience with computer games made her comfortable with the idea of death being negotiable. So when she found a cache of old space memorabilia in her grandfather's attic, she never guessed that her eagerness to right a historic wrong would meet with such ferocious opposition.
But it only made her more determined to give this man his spaceflight, even a century late. She would learn the skills, develop the code, and do whatever it took.
The Shadow of a Dead God
What secrets lie beneath an alien world?
A routine archeological dig on a world once ruled by the mysterious Star Tyrants. For Moon-born Liu Shang, working on a planetary surface might be unsettling, but she could manage -- until the dreams started.
Unwilling to drag others into a harebrained search, she headed out alone, contrary to mission rules. Just as she was about to give up, she found an unlikely artifact.
Handling it connects her to the mind of a long-ago rebel against the Star Tyrants' rule. Nothing will ever be the same.
A short story.
The Moon Mirror
Chelsea Ayles dreamed of going to the Moon since she was a child. Now her dream job at NASA has turned into a nightmare, thanks to those many blood-sucking arachnids. Yeah, politics, as in a Senator accusing her of destroying America's priceless heritage because she chose the moonrocks that were used to make a proof-of-concept mirror segment for a lunar telescope project. Now the mirror sits in her office like a bitter mockery of what might have been -- until the day her reflection turns into a handsome stranger who calls himself the Man in the Moon and offers her visions of a world that might have been. Visions that ignite a longing of an intensity she hasn't known since she was in grade school and watched videos of the Apollo lunar missions in science class.
All the Little Hedgehogs
In Soviet Union, genetic engineering does you.
Yona wondered why everyone kept steering him toward a military career, until one of his teachers noticed his aptitude for genetics. Now he's the personal student of Academician Voronsky, working in a secret genetic engineering facility in a closed town.
However, Yona keeps having to spend as much time babysitting the Academician's adopted son Kolya as actually doing genetics. When this extra assignment becomes a frustration, Yona learns just how quickly privileges can be retracted.
And then he starts learning just how deep the secrets of the Soviet human genetics program really goes.
A story from the Grissom timeline (Gus on the Moon universe).
Caution: Contains intense material that may be disturbing to some readers. Reader discretion advised.
Love in the Time of Campaigning
As Frank Correra brings his family to a lunar settlement to get them away from a worsening political situation on Earth, he reminisces about how he and his wife met.
Frank had always dreamed of the skies. As a clone of an astronaut who subsequently became a US Senator, Frank thought he had a clear path ahead of him. But when it comes time to apply for the Air Force Academy, it is an election year. His ur-brother can't promise a nomination until he's won another term, and this year promises a hard race to run. When the other side puts up an ugly attack ad, can Frank find a way to discredit it before it destroys his ur-brother's chance of re-election, and with it Frank's slot at an Academy appointment?
Starlight Running
Eight lives depend on Kyle's desperate trek across the Moon to get help. But someone -- or something -- intends for him to fail. Can he defeat it in time?
She Dreams Day and Night
Nancy White they called her, a good, solid name for a troubled girl. But she knew her father had called her by another name, before he disappeared through the gate into another world of strange stars and stranger moons. No matter how hard the staff of Hildred House try to force her to forget, she remembers. And longs to reopen the gate, to rejoin her father on that alien shore where cloud-waves break.
The Other Side of Midnight
Life has been a nightmare for Mitya ever since he was arrested on trumped-up charges and exiled to Siberia. But this labor camp in the far north of Magadan Oblast hides a secret far more terrible than the merely human evils of the Great Terror. For the universe we know is not the only one, and there are places where it interpenetrates with universes where the laws of nature as we know them do not operate, where humanity has no place. Worlds inhabited by beings ancient and terrible, to whom humanity are slaves, playthings, food.
The Shadow over Leningrad
In Stalin's Soviet Union, Tikhon Grigoriev lives a precarious life. He knows too much. He's seen too much. A single misstep could destroy him, and if he stumbles, he will take his family down with him. With Leningrad besieged by Nazi armies, the danger has only increased.
He's not a man who wants to come to the notice of those in high places. But when he solved a murder that seemed supernatural, impossible, he attracted the attention of Leningrad's First Party Secretary.
So when a plot of land grows vegetables of unusual size and vigor, and anyone who eats them goes mad, who should be called upon to solve the mystery but Tikhon Grigoriev. However, these secrets could get him far worse than a bullet in the head. For during the White Nights the boundaries between worlds grow thin, and in some of those worlds humanity can have no place.
Perfect Darkness
What would perfect darkness look like? And what would happen if you saw it?
When Pavlik becomes obsessed with the idea of seeing perfect darkness, it becomes a distraction from the pod's duty as asteroid miners. Little does he know that danger lies in opening one's mind to the things that lurk in perfect darkness. Things that endanger his pod-brothers, even all of Briar's Children.
Vengeance is Mine
Chance spared Bina when the Sand Locusts destroyed the village of her birth. Determination kept her alive in the years that followed.
But survival has come at a price. Each day she lives among her captors, she must ignore the signs that their nameless god is not a force of law and justice.
City of Blinding Light
The Columbian Exposition has transformed Chicago into a vision of the bright shining future. However, the electric lights that turn night to day bring no joy to Kitty Hawthorne, and not just because they are the work of her employer's chief rival. Now Edison wants her to abandon her investigation of Tesla's alternating current system and look into a mysterious newcomer. Who is Samuel Gillian, who devises calculating machinery as easily as he builds flying machines?
Grandmaster's Gambit
The disastrous war of 1913 is over, and young journalist Isaak Babel has used his fame as a war correspondent to win a peacetime job covering an international chess tournament in New York City. However, trouble is aboard the airship Grossdeuschland, in the form of the notorious Bolshevik terrorist Koba and his henchmen. Men with a dark plan, and New York City will not welcome their visit
The Wonderful Traveling Medicine Show
Surrounded by a family who were happy with life in their West Virginia mining town, Janeen struggled against the pressure to keep her head down and conform. A dreamer, everyone said, Just like her father. And look what that got him, dead in the Turkish war. But Janeen knew she was meant for a wider world, and one day it came to her in the form of a broken-down steamer and its mysterious owner.
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The Sound of One Child Crying
Who is the child Reza can hear crying every time she goes to the new addition to the Royal Library? Her boss insists there is no child, that it is nothing more than her uncanny sensitivity to the unseen world making a nuisance of itself.
Worse, searching for answers gets her angry rebukes about respect for the dead. The further Reza goes, the more certain she becomes that someone is hiding an ugly secret.
It's a secret that traces back two generations, to a dark period in this land's history. A time most people would prefer to forget, not caring that denial doesn't make a problem go away.
The truth may set you free, but not without a price. And Reza fears that death itself might turn out to be an easier price than the one demanded of her.
Ice Storm
Everywhere Evangeline looks, a thin coating of ice makes objects gleam in the sunlight. However, the beauty proves deceptive, for it hides a deadly secret, one only she can recognize.
In her youth, Evangeline had aspired ot master the powerful magics of her world. Those dreams died the day her Gift awakened uncontrolled and plunged her into a vision of a full fleet battle. The Admiral's Gift will not be denied, and for Evangeline there was no choice but to trade her mage's robes for Navy blue.
Now she is faced with an enemy she cannot fight save by magic. Except those who bear the Admiral's gift are forever barred from working magic.
The Wolf and the Well-Tempered Clavier
With the coronation fast approaching, the Cathedral of St. George the Dragonslayer cannot afford trouble. But come it does, while the cathedral choir director is at the Dragon's Breath Organ, practicing the anthem he wrote at King William's own request. While explaining some technical terms to his understudy, the choir director decides to show off a little.
In the process, he releases an ancient menace from long before humanity came through the worldgate to this place. An entity that strikes him blind, and threatens further harm to anyone who tries to play the Dragon's Breath Organ.
However, they dare not disappoint His Majesty, not on the most momentous day of his reign. Someone must cleanse the Dragon's Breath Organ of this malicious entity, and the choir director cannot. So the task falls to Miss Anne Teesdale, understudy organist.
Now she must delve into the history of the cathedral, and the mysterious ancient magic that fills the organ's windchest. A secret that may well cost this young woman her life.
Or worse, her sanity.
The Stirge
When Liphrel's family fell too far on their debts, he was sold to the priests of the death god. But his family were followers of the birth goddess, which left him in a difficult position.
Novels
The War That Came to Houston
In the midst of preparations for a critical mission, Leland Andersen can't afford the return of a childhood nightmare. Yet night after night the vision torments him, of an astronaut dying in flames.
Nora McKinzie is a Houston police officer -- and a member of an ancient order founded to fight eldritch entities wherever they might flee. When she receives a warning that a sworn enemy is on the move again, her obligations come into conflict with each other.
Both of them are present when Johnson Space Center comes under attack by terrorists. And they both know that the official explanations don't hold together.
Two people, one deadly secret -- and an enemy from beyond time and space.
A novel of the Grissom timeline.
Previously serialized under the title A Separate War.
Also available at a variety of online bookstores and subscription services.
Khuldhar's War
The war was over, but where was the peace the victors had promised?
Geidliv the Tyrant was dead, and the rogue nation of Karmandios now lay in ruins, its people prostrate before the occupying armies of the five allied nations. But now the winners are quarreling among themselves, and where brothers fight, enemies will enter to widen the gap.
Merekhet is a man torn between competing loyalties, tormented by guilt over his past failures. Raised the scion of a Karmandi noble family, he discovered upon puberty that he was in fact the son of a senior war commander of the telepathic People of the Hawk. Yet he could not entirely disavow his mother's people, and thus became entangled in Geidliv's regime and his nephew Khuldhar's doomed attempt to fight it.
Now Merekhet has evidence that Geidliv used telepathy and the bioscience of the mer-people to create a living weapon from Khuldhar's genetic material and hid it in plain sight. Worse, a former ally now estranged is seeking that weapon, and must not be allowed to capture it, lest all the world of Okeanos fall to far greater tyranny than Geidliv could ever have hoped to create.
Merekhet must regain Khuldhar's confidence, and together they must find the five young men who are the keys to Geidliv's final vengeance weapon.
The Workhouse War
An afternoon for sketching in peace - that was all Nadine Darby wanted. She thought she was taking a shortcut to get past an overgrown levee and gain a better view of the Mississippi for some landscape work. Instead she ended up somewhere else. A place called Elyssium, where the past walks alongside the present. Where you can see a modern car pull up and a Confederate Navy officer climb out, talking on a cellphone.
On the riverbank Nadine met a strange little man who told her he was an artist as well, and showed her his sketchbook to prove it. But no sooner had Nadine made her first friend than she discovered all was not well. She watched in helpless horror as a young man was pursued, arrested and beaten by thugs from an institution that goes by the official name of the City Orphanage, but is generally called the Workhouse by the inhabitants of Port of White Fleet.
Nadine can count herself fortunate that she fell into the company of a man who has little use for this organization. But his efforts to help her attain her artistic ambitions instead attract the attention she must avoid, and draws her into quarrels that have simmered for decades.
Can Nadine thread her way through the myriad perils of this world and save herself and her new-found friends? And even if she defeats the Workhouse, will it be at the cost of losing everything she's found here?
Collections
The Margins of Mundania
A tween boy's Christmas gift opens a world of wonder and brings joy to a whole town fallen on hard times. A young New Englander in the early Twentieth Century discovers that some parts of human history don't bear too close examination. A literary critic in the old Soviet Union must confront his own moral cowardice.
These stories, along with a multitude of bite-sized works of flash fiction, carry you from the most prosaic of events to the moments of awe that offer glimpses of matters larger than ourselves.
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The Space Race Trilogy Omnibus: Time Slips, The Secret of Pad 34, Beach House on the Moon, Plus two exclusive new essays
All three books of the Space Race Trilogy, now together with two exclusive new essays.
Time Slips
What if our most treasured verities were in fact wrong?
To be selected for Project Mercury and be one of America's first astronauts was a dream come true for test pilot Deke Slayton. But fellow Mercury astronaut Al Shepard kept telling old stories from his native New England, tales of monstrous entities like Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth. Earlier generations had viewed them as demons, but might they in fact be aliens, here long before humanity?
Soon Deke discovers evidence that something is watching the US space program. Something that begrudges humanity the stars and would put a ceiling on human attainment. Something that can manipulate time itself.
HP Lovecraft wrote that we dwell on a placid island of ignorance amidst the dark ocean of infinity, and that we were not meant to travel far.
What might the US space program have looked like in a cosmos filled with hostile eldritch entities? Would they notice us as playthings? Or as a nuisance to be dealt with?
The Secret of Pad 34
Who would put a ceiling on humanity's expansion into space?
That's what Gus Grissom wants to know. While fishing offshore from Cape Canaveral, he glimpses a mysterious undersea city of unearthly geometries, marked with a strange three-armed cross symbol.
His efforts to research it bring him veiled threats from strangers at his door. Trouble blights an exemplary career. However, Gus refuses to be cowed into silence, and pursues every lead he can find.
HP Lovecraft wrote that we live on a placid island of ignorance and were not meant to travel far. This is the Space Race in a world where the Soviet Union is not our only adversary.
Beach House on the Moon
The Moon is a dead world, airless and desolate. Emmaline Waite has known this fact since childhood, when she watched the Apollo landings.
But here she sits on the shores of the Sea of Tranquillity, looking up at the gibbous Earth as the waves roll in. What madness can this be?
She gets no time to contemplate that question, for she is not alone. She is about to enter a realm of love and fear, of mind-bending secrets that change her understanding of human history, and of self-sacrifice.
Her life will never be the same.
Miskatonic University in the Cold War and Contemporary Era
How would H.P. Lovecraft's famous fictional institution of higher education have developed through the second half of the Twentieth Century and into the Twenty-first?
Space: Gernsback vs. Lovecraft
A look at the fundamental worldviews underlying the approaches of Hugo Gernsback and H.P. Lovecraft to the portrayal of outer space, aliens, and space travel.
Non-Fiction
The History of the Implementation of the Library Computer System (LCS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Originally the author's thesis for a master's degree at Illinois State University, this work examines the history fo library automation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from the earliest beginnings through the implementation of the Library Computer System (LCS) under the leadership of Hugh Atkinson to the creation of the ILLINET Online (IO) system. All of the chainges are studied in teh contest of the Illinois Board of Higher education (IBHE) mandate for library resource sharing throughout Illinois' academic libraries to reduce expenditures while maintaining quality scholarship and education, and of the effects these changes had on library services to the user population.
The process of implementing LCS is studied to show the way in which the library administration handled the various crises as they arose and what effects these decisions had on the long-term structure of the system. Following implementation, it continues to study the subsequent developments of the online computer system to increase service to the library's users. In addition, three doctoral dissertation are examined which used LCS as a research tool for the study of collection and use patterns in academic libraries. Finally, the author examines the results of automation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the context of the academic community and the state of Illinois at large, and draws conclusions from them.
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