![]() ![]() ![]() Baxter’s speculative fiction never strays too far from the human element, and the protagonists are put through the wringer. The Malleus Jesu and those who travel in it are merely the tip of the awesomeberg as Baxter continues to deploy his trademark mix of hard science, speculative fiction and human drama in the followup Ultima. Stephen Baxter’s world and time-spanning Proxima ended on a brain-melting cliffhanger: Roman centurions stepping out of a wooden spaceship with SPQR printed on the side, speaking Latin. – Dire warnings of history about to repeat itself from Stephen Baxter’s Ultima Tell him to flee – out of the system, with the greatest acceleration he can muster – tell him to flee as Lex McGregor once fled, with the kernel drive burning. Don’t hover near Mars, waiting to see what happens. “Penny called, ‘Oh, and Mardina – tell that centurion of yours, make him instruct his trierarchus – tell him not to hang around. ![]()
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![]() ![]() The coat room girl finds him a few minutes later, holding the sleeve of the coat. ![]() He also notices the smell of wood smoke on the coat someone has just left behind. Searching for its origin, the Count finds himself in the coat room, where someone has just come in in from outside. In one of the best pieces of “showing, not telling” I’ve seen, the Count has been inside for about a year when he feels a blast of cold air in a hallway. But confinement is confinement, and it strains the count at times. There are worse places to be confined than a Grand Hotel. He was moved from his suite to an attic storage room and told that if he stepped out of the hotel, he would be shot.īelieving that “if a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them,” the Count determines to make the best of his. Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov lived there in 1922, when he was convicted as an unrepentant aristocrat, declared a Former Person, and sentenced to house arrest. Amor Towles novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, takes place almost entirely within the walls of the grand Metropol Hotel in Moscow. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() (We retirees have a plethora of activities to fill up our days. I was thinking about all of that yesterday as I channel surfed during the afternoon. More: A lovely spring stroll around Chelsea Parade with a detour to the Lower Falls What I do recall makes me shudder and I strive to remember as little as possible for as much as possible. The old man I've been sentenced to become never existed in those fevered fantasies of the young me and I am still amazed at how well I survived that person's excesses as if that were, itself, a success. I'm grateful I don't remember more about some of those nights and the state I was in, and I am grateful beyond words for somehow not succumbing because of behavior that went well beyond "youthful indiscretion" without harming myself or anyone else. This was long before Joseph Heller's "Closing Time" was a state of mind and an attitude check. Some of us, I think, probably didn't go home, or have homes to go home to, but leave we did. ![]() The folks who ran Olde Queens, and who probably still do, were always very patient with us, and much more kind than they needed to be (considering our age and the terrible fake IDs we all had) in moving us out when it was time to close. ![]() |