PLANET MAGAZINE

Illustration: “ET Kid Gets Rocket” by Steve Cartwright (c) 2005

When the Solinarians asked me to save their planet, I told them it would cost at least $10,000,000,000,000 credits. “Plus expenses,” I added. We’d met for lunch at Hammerhead Hank’s Intergalactic Multi-Ethnic Bar and Grill, and I was eating the Telexu squid burger with pickled yenkils on the side. “Plus, it’d be nice to maybe have a city named after me, or a public holiday. But not one of those holidays nobody celebrates. I want to be the holiday everybody gets a day off work for.”

Genezel Ho, the Solinarian rep I was meeting with, was eating rice noodles with a thamboso-bat cream sauce that gives me diarrhea. He paused from the disgusting, appetite-killing slurping noises he was making and lifted his snout from the plate. “The Solinarian people do not labor as other races do,” he said, boastfully. “We are what you would call a utopian society.”

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Dear Editor: I am the administrator for the Odyssey Writing Workshop, an internationally known program for writers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, held annually at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH. Applications for early admission are due January 31, 2005. More information can be found on our web site: www.sff.net/odyssey .
Sincerely,
Susan Sielinski
Administrator
Odyssey Writing Workshop
susansielinski@yahoo.com

Dear Editor: I am wondering whether you can review my new art book in your publication — the book is titled Daydreaming.
Thanks!
Slawek

P.S. My online art gallery can be visited at:
http://www.slawcio.com/myart.html

Editor’s Note: As we told Slawek, we don’t do reviews. However, we think his online gallery is definitely worth a visit!

Cursing the Guardian, Jerrine glanced at the digits counting down the release cycle for airlock CX2. It served no purpose. Nothing she could do would speed up the replacement of argon with nothingness.

The other transcendentals used to mock her impatience as irrational, but she clung to every remaining human trait she possessed, thinking it the last defense against the insanity that had gripped the others.

Locked away from each other in their fantasy worlds, she wondered whether the other transcendentals still considered themselves human at all.

Ten seconds until the cycle completed.

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