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WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE . ..
proud on the tiny bridge, and the sun also made color with his teeth.
• She was on the pier, the boards click-clacking under her soles as she ran and yelled, pushing past the people, not caring if she bumped the wealthiest Norteamericano in the world into the bay.
“Grandfather, Grandfather… 1”
His hands smelled of fish when he picked her up, but they were good at brushing away tears.
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Dream Done Green
Where do you get your ideas?
That has to be the question most often asked of writers, and writers of science fiction in particular. I tend to the answer the great writer-artist Carl Barks gave when his character inventor Gyro Gearloose inquired of a nondescript bird as to why it sings, and the bird replied, “Oh, maybe I’m glad, maybe I’m sad, maybe I’m a little mad.”
But there are exceptions. A farmgirl in Maryland wrote me once and happened to mention that her favorite books were about horses, and science fiction. Why, she wondered, weren’t there more science-fiction horse stories?
I wondered too, and so …
The life of the woman Casperdan is documented in the finest detail, from birth to death, from head to toe, from likes to dislikes to indifferences.
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WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE . ..
Humans are like that.
The stallion Pericles we know only by his work.
Horses are like that.
We know it all began the year 1360 Imperial, 1822 After the Breakthrough, 2305 after the human Micah Schell found the hormone that broke the lock on rudimentary animal intelligence and enabled the higher mammals to attain at least the mental abilities of a human ten-year-old.