I just finished The Thousand Earths by S. Baxter. It was very, very good. It explored a breadth of settings that was stitched together by brief interludes of a 22nd century traveler. While I enjoyed it and thought it well constructed and excellently laid out, I was saddened by how setting driven it was, as opposed to character driven.

Never thought the day would come where I wanted to read about a love plot in my scifi.

That said why does it seem like so many books are about humanity at the heat death of the universe? That's what my last scifi book was on too...

#scifi #reading #books @bookstadon

Cyprus Dance Film Festival, supported by my #publisher Deep Immersion.

So honored to present my future #scifi book The Closed Tunnel on the red carpet and give an interview to Cyprus TV☺️

It's such an elegant way to push me to finish writing The Closed Tunnel faster😅.

I’m not sure it will work this way, but still, the attempt counts!

@bookstadon @scifi

Today in Labor History September 30, 1912: The Lawrence, Massachusetts “Bread and Roses” textile strike was in full swing. On this date, 12,000 textile workers walked out of mills to protest the arrests of two leaders of the strike. Police clubbed strikers and arrested many, while the bosses fired 1,500. IWW co-founder Big Bill Haywood threatened another general strike to get the workers reinstated. Strike leaders Arturo Giovannitti and Joe Ettor were eventually acquitted 58 days later. During the strike, IWW organizers Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn came up with the plan of sending hundreds of the strikers' hungry children to live with sympathetic families in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont, a move that drew widespread sympathy for the strikers. Nearly 300 workers were arrested during the strike; three were killed. After the strike was over, IWW co-founder and socialist candidate for president, Eugene Debs, said "The Victory at Lawrence was the most decisive and far-reaching ever won by organized labor."

Several novels have been written against the backdrop of this famous strike: The Cry of the Street (1913), by Mabel Farnum; Fighting for Bread and Roses (2005), by Lynn A. Coleman; Bread and Roses, Too (2006), by Katherine Paterson

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #BreadAndRoses #union #strike #IWW #massachusetts #BigBillHaywood #GeneralStrike #police #PoliceBrutality #fiction #novel #HistoricalFiction #books #author #writer @bookstadon

Today in Labor History August 4, 1792: Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was born. He promoted freedom of speech, ending aristocratic and clerical privilege, and equal distribution of income and wealth. He was also a vegetarian, advocate for free love and an atheist, who wrote about the link between organized religion and social repression. His poems and political writings were admired by Marx, Gandhi and others. His poem The Mask of Anarchy (1819) was the first modern work to support nonviolent protest. It was recited by students at the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and by protesters in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Shelley wrote The Mask of Anarchy following the Peterloo Massacre (8/16/1819), when the British cavalry charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people who had gathered to demand political representation, killing 13. He was married to, Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein.

The Mask of Anarchy:

Rise, like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you:
Ye are many—they are few!

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #anarchism #FreeSpeach #poetry #poet #marx #FreeLove #frankenstein #PercyByssheShelley #protest #demonstration #Revolution #nonviolence @bookstadon