Notes From The Buffer Zone: A Different World

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch | Jun 16, 2014 | 2 comments

I’m really not nostalgic for the past. The world I was born into had elevated racism to an art, didn’t believe that women could contribute anything of value to society, and the average US life expectancy was less than 70 years (66.6 for men; 73.10 for women). The poor...

Clash of Cultures—School Systems at (the) Stake, Part 2

by Rainer Prem | Jun 16, 2014 | 0 comments

Wolfgang Ratke and the “Ratichians” Since the ideas of Wolfgang Ratke, aka Ratichius, influenced all of his successors, friends and foes alike, the whole bunch of pedagogues of the seventeenth century interested in reforms is routinely called...

Ein feste Burg, Episode 15

by Rainer Prem | Jun 14, 2014 | 5 comments

Chapter 24: Make the Deaf Hear and the Mute Speak The North Sea off Husum, Nordfriesland November 1634 Lorenz Melffsen looked over the water, his tears flowing. "Are you sure," he asked the captain of the fishing boat. "That this is the place where Morsum was?" The...

The Queen’s Gearhead

by Mark Huston | Jun 14, 2014 | 2 comments

The buggy was running good. The open exhaust behind Trent’s head roared into the night with just the right tone, a low rumble with a harsh rasp at the end of the note. It sounded right. The breeze in his face over the windscreen felt great. Trent Haygood was...

Perception

by Karina Gallam | Jun 13, 2014 | 1 comment

March 2000 “Just me here, Mom. Aunt Marian and Uncle Hunter went to do some errands.” “How are things going for you?” “School’s fine. Church is fine. It’s just . . . other stuff.” “Like what?” “Things...

The Mysterious Mesa, Part Four: Giants in the Earth

by Garrett W. Vance | Jun 12, 2014 | 0 comments

Ni-T'o stood at the outer edge of the slightly tilted meadow, a chunk of terrain that had slid down intact from the collapsed tip of the mesa. It was grassy, and lined with trees, so they had made it their camp. Ni-T'o knew its foliage well, the same grew in his...

Franklin’s Monsters, Act IV: Apples of Love

by Terry Howard | Jun 11, 2014 | 2 comments

Grantville, 1633 While tying his bag behind his saddle, Pierre Le Blanc said to his wife, “Odette, I am not at all comfortable with my leaving you and your sister alone here in Grantville for a month or two. It just does not seem like a good idea. What if...

An Uneasy Kind of Peace, Episode Three

by Virginia DeMarce | Jun 3, 2014 | 0 comments

Innsbruck, Tyrol “It is a good protocol,” Claudia de' Medici said. “We agree with Dr. Guarinonius that We need for it to be uniform.” She gestured at Dr. Bienner. “Let it occur.” Bienner, having a considerable amount of experience in understanding the regent,...

The Undergraduate, Episode Six

by Jack Carroll | Jun 2, 2014 | 1 comment

Previously . . . In 1628 Matthias Ehrenhardt was orphaned at the age of 14, when his family home in the small village of Vehra burned to the ground. To have any sort of future, he was forced to leave his Heimat, the place where he grew up and truly belonged, and go...