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See You in the Cosmos
Exploring Space: From Galileo to the Mars Rover and Beyond
The Terranauts: A Novel
A Quiet Kind of Thunder
Gumnut Babies
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42/264 pages
Highly Illogical Behaviour
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Revenger
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75/425 pages
See What I Have Done
The Dog, Ray
Forgetting Foster
Something Going Around
There’s an “epidemic” going around. People are throwing themselves in front of cars. Stan witnessed it, so did Victor, and that guy on the stool next to Stan at the bar.
People have noticed it happening, but the "victims" are just poor unhappy fools trying to end it all, right?
I’ve never read anything by Harry Turtledove before, but a friend of mine is a huge fan, and now I’m wondering what took me so long!
There is just so much I liked about this story.
The main character was telling the story to us, sometimes interrupting the flow of the story to correct himself on his descriptors. But it was done in such an easy, colloquial, engaging way, that you almost feel you are in fact having a conversation with Stan.
This story came complete with a lesson in Toxoplasmosis.
Namely how Toxoplasmosis in these guys:
Increases their chances of being eaten by and passing on the parasites to these guys:
Which can then be passed on to humans.
(Don’t worry, it’s all very interesting and important to the story.)
What I loved about this story was that it showed the character speculating on something without ever voicing it(to others or in his head), and the climactic scene came very subtly, with allusions to things earlier in the story letting us know what was going on, without having to spell it out for us.
Yes, I knew what was going on before I reached the halfway point in the story, and I suspect Stan did, too, but it was written in such a way that I was happy to stay for the duration of the ride, and will definitely keep an eye out for other works by this author.
You can read this story for free, here: http://www.tor.com/stories/2014/04/something-going-around-harry-turtledove