Synopsis: Young Adam Eismann and his mother, both Jewish, are kidnapped to an alternate history in which the Nazis won World War II. In this United States, Nazi racial doctrine is accepted as fact and the country has deported all the Jews decades ago, supposedly to Madagascar. Adam and his mother hide in a small Manhattan apartment. There they come to grips with their unrealized hope for rescue and this world’s weird technology. They must accept living in this world and call it home, even as they learn the terrible truth.
They make friends and enemies: a local Nazi named Richtor, a propagandist named Byrding, and menacing leaders from Germania hatching insidious plots; and the more Adam and his mother try to keep their heads down the more involved they become in this New York City. And then a neo-Nazi from our world who has stolen Frankenthaler’s secret kidnaps Adam to further his own ends.The Frankenthaler Inequation, Book II.
And now some short stories. All of these are in PDF format, except
for the ones that aren't in links, which are in no format, yet. You can
get Adobe Acrobat here.
In Henry's Card Trick, Henry Hiscox learns.. well, now that I think about this story for the first time in years, I don't think he actually learns anything. But his girlfriend Anna learns what a bad idea it is to date Henry Hiscox, especially when he learns a card trick that will change the world.
In Johnny Legs, the privileged scion of a vast machine-linked intelligence grows bored with his life of tooling around the solar system and as he's 1/128th Native American he is allowed to return to the evacuated parkland that is Earth in the far future, and live off the land.
In Day 1323, a woman with no memory of the previous day wakes, and discovers that this day is like every other: every day she forgets everything, and her only link to her own life is by leaving notes to herself. (I wrote this long before the movie "Memento.") What's more, she isn't the only one afflicted by this condition. But this day isn't like every other.
The Last Laugh has Dr. Bequay learning something important about human nature. Well, no; he really didn't, he just thinks he did.
In Garlic Capital of the World I may have had something to say about violence against women and its consequences on everybody, but mostly it's a creepy vampire story.
You heard it here first: Divorcing the Alien is about me.
In Meeting Cecilia Thumb there's this guy who's a collector, see, and he collects stuff. One day these Time Patrol types have the bright idea to put him in charge of a time machine. Needless to say, that wasn't so bright an idea. He's gonna put one over on them in order to love a famous author of the past. Note to time travelers: don't do this.
In The Pitch the main character is an ordinary guy, not unlike every other guy in a future America in which everyone is required to be a ruthless salesman. Only this guy meets an alien who wants to take over the world and is starting with him. He's going to have a hard sell.
I've always liked the ordinary-person-meets-alien story. In Literature,
Charles Pennet is visited by an alien who intends to destroy the
world unless he writes alien-physique oriented pornography for it. It
was my first completed story,
around 1990, and I haven't thought of it in years until I thought
of including it in this little collection. Curiously, I always felt
driven to create, and forced myself to write even when I didn't
want to. Note to other writers: don't do this. Leads to burn-out,
assuming you ever write anything worth burning out on. This marginal
story is a case in point.
There are more reasons to not finish a story than there are to
finish one, to judge by the fact that I have more unfinished
stories than finished ones. Here are bits too good to just let
rot in some file, but which for some reason or other just never
went anywhere. Why bother making them public? Maybe I'm hoping
someone will beg me to finish one of these up. Now there's
motivation. Begging. Yeah, works for me.
In The Eye Story, a dying little girl discovers something magical about her neighbor. But mostly it's the fact that his eye goes off and wanders around in their apartment that gets her attention.
Here's my entry in the last Bulwer-Lytton contest. I didn't win. Perhaps they didn't get it.
In The First Bit of a D&D Story, the wily wizard and his brutish knight get as far as almost packing for their journey, but I couldn't write the rest of the story as funny as the first few paragraphs.
And here, at least, is The First Paragraph of the best
story I've ever written.
