Joseph Mallozzi 🏴‍☠️

The search for our ship’s fighter continues (The Elite Eight)! Choose -

Today, I'm recommending four essential works by Kit Reed, whose prose the New York Times Book Review once called "pure dry ice"—skeptical, precise, and deeply satirical. Thinner Than Thou (2004): In a near-future America where the cult of the body has become the one true religion, the anorexic and the obese alike are handed over to the Dedicated Sisters—a convent order whose "cures" run to forced feeding and enforced starvation—while the Reverend Earl preaches the paradise of the "Afterfat." A brilliant, unsettling satire of diet culture and the worship of appearance that only reads as more prescient today. "The Food Farm" (1967): A heavy young woman is shipped off to a sinister reducing institution in this razor-sharp story of appetite, bodily control, and the tyranny of thinness—the clear ancestor of Thinner Than Thou, written nearly four decades earlier. "Automatic Tiger" (1964): A timid man buys a lifelike mechanical tiger and finds it lends him status and nerve—until it doesn't. A poignant, faintly sinister fable about borrowed confidence and manufactured identity, and one of Reed's most beloved stories. "The Wait" (1958): A mother and daughter find themselves trapped in a surreal town governed by inexplicable local rituals. Reed's very first published story remains one of her eeriest and most memorable. Check out the quoted thread for the recommended works of Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester, Bob Shaw, Clifford D. Simak, Algis Budrys, A.E. van Vogt, C.L. Moore, Cordwainer Smith, C.M. Kornbluth, D.G. Compton, Thomas M. Disch, Alice Bradley Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr.), John Brunner, Judith Merril, Hal Clement, James Blish, Jack Williamson, Katherine MacLean, Fred Saberhagen, Jack Vance, Leigh Brackett, Edgar Pangborn, R.A. Lafferty, William Tenn, Kate Wilhelm, Avram Davidson, James H. Schmitz, Eric Frank Russell, Brian W. Aldiss, Carol Emshwiller, Wilson Tucker, Chad Oliver, Zenna Henderson, Pauline Ashwell, Frederik Pohl, Henry Kuttner, Barrington J. Bayley, James P. Hogan, C.J. Cherryh, Margaret St. Clair, Keith Laumer, Charles L. Harness, Howard Waldrop, Rosel George Brown, Gordon R. Dickson, Robert Sheckley, and Fredric Brown.

The search for our ship’s fighter continues (The Elite Eight)! Choose -

BREAKING: June CPI inflation falls to 3.5%, below expectations of 3.8% Core CPI inflation falls to 2.6%, below expectations of 2.8%. Month-over-month CPI inflation fell -0.4%, the biggest monthly drop since May 2020. US stock market futures are surging on the news.

Stargate alt. scene - "Wormhole X-treme" (No Old Man Left Behind)