Author Archives: Ernest Lilley

Eggs

In my senior year of high school, I was sent to live with my grandparents, because I was being difficult. One of the upsides to this was that when I went to the new school, they asked me what classes I wanted to take, something that had never happened before. I’m pretty sure that’s because I was on some sort of college track, which kept putting me in upper-level math and science courses, which I kept nearly failing.

It turned out that you could take classes in drawing, ceramics, and photography. There was even something called “Interdisciplinary Environmental Science” which included a week (in the dead of winter) at the NJ State Ecological center where I slept in an unheated cabin and hiked all day. Continue reading →

Garden Kneeler/Stool/Tool Tray

I had so much fun with Fort Tomato (II) last week, that I needed an excuse for more woodworking. Well, there happened to be a fresh crop of mushrooms in the soggy section of the lawn and I planned to weed them, and a hose that needed mending, but I hate getting down on my knees. They never did bend all that way, and they do so less now. Continue reading →

Driving the Deep (Finder Chronicles #2) by Suzanne Palmer 

Think the blackness of space is scary? Wait till you see the darkness in the ocean below the ice on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

Driving the Deep (Finder Chronicles #2)
by Suzanne Palmer
May 5th, 2020 DAW

Fergus Ferguson is a lost boy with a talent for finding things…no matter where in the galaxy they wind up. Granted, he’s not been a boy for quite a while, but his childhood traumas still haunt him — an abusive mother and a father that committed suicide in front of him — and that’s bound to leave a mark.

He ran away from Scotland when he was old enough to steal an older cousin’s motorcycle, and it’s been hanging over his head ever since. Though he’s built a career, and a reputation, as a sort of galactic repo man and troubleshooter, been captured and changed by aliens, and found a group of friends at the edge of the Solar System that he’d do anything for, it’s his past that he can’t get past. Continue reading →

Three Contemporary Fantasies: A Cowgirl, a Ranger, and a Flower Arranger Walk Into Weirdness

I don’t read a lot of fantasy, but there are a few books I love. Kim Antieau’s Coyote Cowgirl, Tim Pratt’s debut novel The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, and Richard Grant’s In the Land of Winter. Even though I have all three in hardcover, I have them in eBook version too, except for Grant’s, because that’s not available. Which is why I’ve read most of Kim Antieau’s work, a fair amount of Tim Pratt’s, and only one of Richard Grant’s. Continue reading →

Science Fiction to Look for This April

Originally Published: Amazing Stories, April 6. 2020

I hope you’re all doing ok out there, staying inside and keeping safe. Fortunately, as science fiction readers, we’re not the ones saying, “Nobody could have seen this coming,” because we’ve seen it coming since H.G. Wells slew a Martian invasion by infecting aliens with Earth germs. So stay safe, and catch up on your reading. Continue reading →