Having just “reached her majority” at novel’s end, which by Texas law would have meant turning 18 years of age, 18 years into which she has packed several lives’ worth of incident and grief and loss. — Someone, on Dotty This afternoon, I revised my Dotty resource and started thinking about the novel’s somewhat murky chronology. Dotty is young at the end of the book, but eighteen can’t be right. At the beginning of Chapter XII, “Dotty was sixteen (seventeen in the fall).” The

Book editors don’t add glosses or footnotes to the old SF stories they reprint, but many of those stories require cultural references that modern readers are not likely to recognize, because the references come from mid-century (i.e. the last century) popular culture. How many people under seventy will recognize that Philip K. Dick’s “Oh, to Be a Blobel!” is a reference to Marianne Moore’s poem, “Oh, to Be a Dragon”? Or that his “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” riffs o

By anybody’s standards, this was a beautiful place. The folded, rolling hills were covered with clover, or they were covered with grapes. Everywhere the three explorers walked the air was pleasantly noisy with bees. There were a dozen heavy white cattle grazing belly-deep in clover, there were exposed rock strata of shale and slate and chalk. There were beech groves. “I have never seen time piled up so deep in a place,” Ethan Farquharson said. “Not insufferably ancient time,