In a gathering of stories, Many Have Pictures Like This chronicles a family’s history and passing, from Armenian villages before WWI to the Armenian Genocide, to Romania, and finally to the United States. Much is fictionalized, all is based on truth, and the author asks the question throughout: What is owed to one’s dead?

Whether walking with his father to a pizzeria or sitting with his mother in an imagined coffee house, whether enjoying his grandmother’s immigrant mac-and-cheese or playing catch with a friend on a hot New York day and encountering his godmother, the author learns what life demanded from his family. “I guess what I’m most interested in,” he says, “what I need to know, is how they continued on with their lives—with their spirits intact to varying degrees—after what they’d endured by the circumstances of their origins and time and place.” His own place as an immigrant and his family’s expectations for him are in the mix. And there’s the necessary acknowledgment that the monsters his family escaped never go away, not even in the New World.

Sometimes serious, sometimes playful, and with lessons learned from salmon and ravens in the author’s attempt to flee his family’s story, this collection is a mythology of a handful of people with experiences not entirely unique in the history of the world, though they were.

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Serengeti by J. B. Rockwell

Dark and Stars: Serengeti Series, Book 2 by J. B. Rockwell

Hecate: Serengeti Series, Book 0 by J. B. Rockwell

Appassionata by Carol Doumani

Five Part Invention by Andrea J. Buchanan

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Golden House by Salman Rushdie

The Goodbye Coast by Joe Ide

Ishq by Usman T. Malik

Viral by Ann Bausum

Creativity by John Cleese (narrated by John Cleese)

It was Vulgar and It was Beautiful by Jack Lowery

The Dream Runners by Shveta Thakrar

Tell Me How to Be by Neel Patel

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A Thousand Questions by Saadia Faruqi

Alone by Megan E. Freeman

Before We Were Blue by E. J. Schwartz

Call Me Athena by Colby Cedar Smith

When We Were Them by Laura Taylor Namey

Three professional narrators, Mike Vendetti, Kathy Verduin, and Stephen Jay Cohen, lend their voices to what is considered by many to be one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s greatest novels, The Great Gatsby. Travel back with them to the Jazz Age, where the wealthy and entitled collide with pretenders and common citizens. Where “careless people smash up things and creatures and then retreat back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it is that keeps them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made”.

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Commander Scott McNabb and the remaining crew of the ill-fated Hermes survey ship, journey to Earth to an area formally known as Death Valley, now an irradiated wasteland. Their mission is to connect the quantum intelligence, Athena, into the pan-solar communications network, enabling the QIs to rollback control of Earth by the seven and their AI servants.

But their shuttle is damaged as it enters Earth’s atmosphere and it lands far from their intended location. Worse, it has been spotted by the AI that controls the region, and security drones are now searching the area to find it. With little hope of repairing the shuttle, Scott makes the fateful decision for them to journey through the wasteland on foot, even though some of the crew argue that this would be reckless.

But Scott is driven by a deeper motivation. One forged by the singular desire to find out what happened to flight officer Miranda Lee and the child she was carrying. This is because Aria has made him a promise. The QI has assured him that once Athena is reconnected it can then analyze Earth’s vast data-stacks and find her location and, more importantly, find out if she is alive or dead. 

Now, nothing else matters to Scott. He is willing to risk everything to achieve the mission and ultimately find Miranda – even if that means risking the lives of his friends.

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Powerful forces on Earth are now moving to resume inter-AI communications, risking the development of an all-out war. But other powers within the System are also mobilizing to prevent them from achieving their objective. Scott and the remaining crew of the Hermes are totally unaware that they are now at the very nexus of an inter-planetary battle – and ultimately heading toward disaster.

As the mission starts to fall apart Scott begins to realize the secrets that the ship’s QI, Aria, has been hiding from them all along. Secrets that could tip the balance of power within the System. He must now put aside all thoughts of Miranda and focus on trying to save his crew – including Aria. Failure to do so could ultimately plunge the entire System into total chaos.

No pressure, then.

About Entropy:
The story is set a few centuries into the future where humanity has colonized most of the inner solar system. The asteroid belt (The Belt) is now a hive of mining activity and ships ply the trade routes to Earth and Mars. The technology depicted is, for the most part, what I consider to be technically plausible, although I do stretch it a little with quantum entanglement. That said, you won’t need a calculator or a slide-rule to enjoy the story.

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Commander Scott McNabb, of the science vessel Hermes, is three years into a five-year-long survey of the asteroid belt. It’s an excruciatingly dull mission, yet it keeps him far away from the agencies that are chasing him down. However, his fortunes change, along with the other four crew members, when they discover a derelict spaceship in orbit around a binary asteroid. Scott’s share of the salvage would be enough to clear his name and start a new life.

But the ship contains an experimental quantum device, lost while en route to Europa, and ownership of this technology could fundamentally change the balance of power within the solar system. Now that word is out of its discovery, the Hermes finds itself being hunted down by the very people from whom Scott has spent so much time and effort hiding.

If Scott wants any hope of a new life, then he’s going to have to fight for it. Yet, after a lifetime of running and hiding, he’s not sure if he has what it takes – maybe he really is just one of life’s losers. Then again, there is a deep river of rage welling up inside him, born out of a lifetime of countless accumulated injustices, each one inching him ever closer to the edge – and this could be the one that finally makes him snap.

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“Wherefore a novel, when life itself is a novel?” This epigraph to Sholom Aleikhem’s autobiographical narrative From the Fair could be used for everything that came from the pen of that gifted Jewish writer:

Sholom Aleikhem’s characters tell their own story. The Kasrils – inhabitants of Kasilovka – as the writer affectionately calls them, appear before the listener in all their direct and artless simplicity. They wear their hearts upon their sleeves. The very pen-name of the author (Sholom Aleikhem means “peace be upon you”) serves him, as it were, as a kindly greeting to his people, encouraging them to “Speak for yourselves. Show yourselves to the world.”

This collection contains:

“A Love Affair”
“Three Widows”
“The Bewitched Tailor”
“If I Were a Rothchild”
“The Pot”
“Advice”
“Kodno”
“Methuselah”

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Arthur C. Clarke walks the line between science and mysticism in this thought-provoking tale. The story was selected in 1970 by the Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the best science fiction short stories published before the creation of the Nebula Awards. It was published in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929-1964. In 2004, it won the retrospective Hugo Award for Best Short Story for the year 1954.

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When Axe Cooper is murdered while picking up Chinese takeout, he’s pretty irritated about the loss of a good dinner, not to mention being dead. Not prepared to move on just yet, Axe decides to stick around and haunt his best friend Lily Chan while trying to figure out why anyone would kill a janitor. In the meantime, Axe is hired by The Ghost Post to track down recently deceased writers. As he learns more about his new phantom friends, Axe realizes that his murder is not an isolated event and that if he doesn’t learn to fly like Superman, Lily could be next.

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Published in 1844, Rappaccini’s Daughter, is one of Hawthorne’s most well known works. And, when one reviews the plot, the story can be considered an early example of modern science fiction. Later works, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and other more contemporary pieces, come back to consider what Hawthorne explored in these pages – does man have the right to shape nature to his own will?

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