Surface Fish
August newsletter
I find it best to just dive into the sea. Get the shock over with. And anyway, we were in Greece. The water wasn’t cold.
It was early September in Nea Iraklitsa and we still had to keep the air conditioners on all day. Maybe that was the problem. I sneezed one day while hanging laundry out to be scorched and two weeks later I still felt like my head was stuffed with mucus. So it was that I toppled, top-heavy, into the Aegean, where I left my snot behind.
There are surprising fish down there. Goatish ones that nose through the sand where you’ve stepped, slender ones striped or yellow with black eye-spots on their tails. I once saw a pipefish and another time a cuttlefish rippled up to me where I stood in the shallows and flashed Rorschach patterns before jetting away.
This summer, though, was the first time I’d seen the surface-feeding fish. They’re about the size of a car’s electronic keyfob, oval and very thin. From below, their narrow, pale bellies blend in with the sunlight shining through the surface. From above, their dark blue backs are invisible. You can stand in the midst of a school of them and be totally unaware of it. At dusk a surface fish might jump after one of the mosquitoes you’ve attracted, but all you’ll hear is a plup.
Maggie figured out how to spot the surface fish. With your goggles on, you dip your face into the water until the surface is at the level of your eyebrows. Then you look straight forward to see the wheeling ranks of silver-blue ovals.
I tried to do it and coughed. Deep, somewhat frightening coughs that fizzed and rattled in my chest. I didn’t like it. I wanted to be rid of it, so I reached down into myself and brought up a thick, yellow wad as big as my thumb. A clam, as the kids called it in elementary school in Maine.
I treaded water and breathed deep, watching the yellow clam until a fish ate it.
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August was a surprisingly busy month. I experimented with sharing my process and wrote a few posts about constructing the fictional, Thracian-derived language of the Good people of Wealthgiver.
Aside from swimming, conlanging, sneezing, coughing and spending time with my family, I also wrestled with the identity authentification system of Stripe until I finally got it activated and enabled paid subscriptions on Substack. But more on that in the next email.
And I read some books.
Closing Down by
- This short story was good enough for me to recount it to my wife. That’s a high bar. It’s about a ghost - the ghost of turn-of-the-millennium America. The big box stores have gone bankrupt and are full of junk that’s only just barely worth the price of hauling away. Although maybe the price is higher than you think. Go read it.Causes of Separation by Travis J.I. Corcoran - I was going to wait longer and stretch the time between the first book of this excellent duology and its sequel, but I couldn’t help myself. Causes of Separation gives us the invasion of the Moon by the Earth. In fact we get two invasions - the one we should have gotten in the first book and the other, bigger one.
I do have my complaints. This second book felt rushed, with fewer of the fun digressions of the first. It wasn’t just that I missed the Dogs. Corcoran had a chance to illustrate how a libertarian people would fight a war, and he doesn’t make the most of that chance. Important things that should have happened on screen do not, and the end was only okay.
But I can only gripe like this in the first place because I read the book, and I read it because I enjoyed the hell out of it. The science fiction is well-balanced and the jokes are funny. The characters ring true and so do their problems. I don’t know if Corcoran plans to stay in this universe or move to another for his next book, but either way, I’ll follow him.
Terrors of Pangea by John C. Wright - What a blast. Other authors would give their adventurer a break to recover. Our hero escapes the villains with the help of a fellow warrior or friendly native or ancient god and gets a beautiful nurse to feed him and tend his wounds so he’s ready for the next action sequence. Or at least he gets a nap.
Nothing of the sort for Preston Lost on the Last Continent! Lost is relentlessly attacked, pursued, drowned, stung, and hurled off precipices starting at about page two. The friendly native doesn’t speak his language, the fellow warrior is crippled trying to kill him, the ancient god doesn’t have any food to hand, and the beautiful nurse is a prisoner in need of rescuing. The whole book treads the line between presenting impossible problems and solving them.
When I was younger and less wise, I read the first chapter of Terrors of Pangea and put it down because I thought it was silly. It is, but the Gray-piloted flying saucers and albino dinosaurs are underpinned by a great deal of careful thought. Everything hangs together: the action, the world, the exploration of the main character, who is “not a reckless man.” I’m holding the sequel in reserve for when I’m feeling down.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain - I’d only read bits and pieces of this before - episodes from Tom Sawyer’s last summer of boyhood. That makes sense, since this book is so episodic, but there’s a real through-line with the boys and their games bumping up against real thieves and murderers.
Starship’s Mage Omnibus by Glynn Stewart - This book went its entire length without ever getting quite boring enough to make me quit. I was really hooked by the premise: the royal monopoly on magical warp-drives has intentionally crippled the spaceships it sells, so that if it ever comes to a war, the Mage King will have an overwhelming advantage over his clients. Except an outsider mage jailbreaks his ship, turning it into a major threat and a target of the Mage King and every pirate, gangster, and planetary government who wants to learn its secret.
But then Stewart keeps failing to deliver. The scary warlords and witch-hunters turn out to be reasonable people who were never really a threat. I was disappointed.
See you next month