Steve Jeffery says: That was a great cover by R'ykander. Is it scraperboard? That's something I've been playing with recently. You can get a cheap and cheerful version on better quality paper if you leave the lid up on a photocopier and then press the copy button. That covers the whole page in black and you can scratch it back to the white paper underneath with a sharp edge. Fun to play with, but very messy; little flakes of black get everywhere as you're working so you have to have a lot of tissues handy to clean up and stop things smudging.
Vikki has adopted a family of hedgepigs this summer. There's at least four, two adults and two babies, although it's difficult to tell. While it was hot, we left out water and bread in watered milk for them each night as they come through our garden. I know they're carnivores, and you're not supposed to feed them milk but (a) I draw the line at cutting up worms for anybody and (b) they dig into the bread and completely ignore the cat food we left out.
They're not timid at all. Or else they're very short sighted as they practically walk over our feet on the way to the dish. This has got bigger as there seemed to be more of them. It's now a twelve inch pizza tray. The babies are voracious. The first thing we noticed was the tray standing up on end one night. Carefully peeking around the back door (although he was so absorbed, I don't think he's had noticed if we stood right over him) we could see a spiny body holding the edge down to get at the last drop of milk.
The other tactic was to climb inside and wander around making contented (and very loud) snuffling noises for five or ten minutes before wandering off and climbing through into the next garden to find somebody else to feed them. I hadn't realised hedgehogs could actually climb, although they're not very stealthy about it. You can hear them coming from the other end of the garden. Mind you, I don't suppose slugs and worms need to be tracked with any degree of stealth.
John Ollis writes: Like Alan Sullivan, I enjoyed Heinlein's juveniles. Sadly I did not read them when I was a kid, as the library did not stock Heinlein (or Asimov). I found the books in a secondhand shop when I was about 25. Strangely, they did not strike me as particularly juvenile, and I enjoyed them a lot. Whisper this, but I read Time for the Stars again earlier this year, and it's still a good story -- soppy ending, of course. My second childhood must have arrived early.
In Karen Cooper's otherwise enjoyable piece on lightning bugs, she bemoans the scarcity of them nowadays. There's one obvious reason for that. Millions of little kids all across the US all squashing the bugs at the point of lighting up so that they -- the kids -- can smear themselves with the light-stuff. It's surprising there's any left now. How long before the lightning bug is as scarce as the passenger pigeon: i.e. extinct?
KV Bailey writes: An idyll with a strange (and strangely informative) edge to it was Deirdre Sholto-Douglas's piece. I wonder if by chance she had in mind, or even hidden away somewhere out of mind, William Blake's Songs of Experience, where 'The Garden of Love' yields "tombstones where flowers should be", where, assiduously cultivated, 'The Poison Tree' does its lethal work, and where that poem of liberation and renewal, 'Ah! Sunflower', seems symbolically to endorse the intent of Deirdre's final sentence: "Next year she grows sunflowers".
A nostalgia for youth colours two other contributions. Karen Cooper's 'Lightning Bugs', in looking back to a child's experience of hot dry summers in suburban Chicago, evokes poignantly that almost universally remembered time when "kids want to play in the long evening coolness". P.T Ross's 'A Picnic by the River' speaks of those early scents and sounds ("my first corncrake", "the rich scents of the cow-byre") which are never forgotten. The battleship happening is wonderful. I'd like to complement it with a recollected coincidence of time and place, for I, too, in the November of 1941 (and you must realise that I am a Father William among fans) knew that wartime Firth of Clyde, sailing its waters from Gourock out to join our convoy and into my war. Those green and misty islands sliding by were the last I was to see of Britain before the autumn of 1945, and their image endures.
At the risk of boring, I'll add another memory which in its way is companion to the battleship one. When I was such an infant as P.T. Ross then had been, living, however, not by the Clyde, but the Trent. I was taken one evening late in 1918, or maybe early in 1919, by a grown-up cousin to Bentinck Road Junction in Nottingham to see the Victory Tram go by. It came rumbling out of the darkness, resplendent in double-deck-outlining coloured lamps, glorious with crests, flags and banners, wheels shrieking over the points, trolley flashing showers of sparks from the overhead wire, and seeming for a moment to fill the universe before roaring away downhill, a receding but triumphant dragon. It was perhaps no match for the great Duke of York with its saluting band, but for me it remains an indelible early immensity. It is surely serendipitous that memories spun from the substance of two World Wars should find a generation-spanning locus on long-obsolete machines: a kind of achieved memic synchronicity.
Teddy Harvia writes: The Cumbrae Mermaid sounds like a cold nymph with a heart of stone. My kind of fantasy female!
Unlike apparently all my science fiction friends, I did not discover the bulk of the genre until I was an adult. As a child, I was forced to read boring stuff like Macbeth, Beowulf, Great Expectations and Ivanhoe.
Because of his adolescent fascination with sex in a sexless society, Heinlein's stories have not held up well over time. His "society defines characters" premise wears thin. I want to see inside.