5984 puzzle

Anyone need a nice number puzzle these days?


5984 is a factor in an interesting product. If you multiply 5984 by a certain four-digit number, ABCD, the product is BBAADDCC: The same four digits in the second number, but repeated in that pattern. Can you find the number?

Enjoy...

I’m plugging away at a third story, set mostly in a space station hovering over Saturn in the form of a “neo-Gothic” castle. I mean it to have a sense of doom and foreboding, like the first arrival in Dracula’s castle. The story’s mood is different from what I’ve attempted so far. I hope my other commitments will let me finish it this month, but ... time will tell.

Drama-Junkie Nation

When drama was first invented in Ancient Greece, people consumed perhaps twenty hours of it per year, during annual festivals. Today people typically consume that much in a week or less.

Here’s a disquieting theory: our mass-overdosing on drama is causing widespread psychological harm that weakens our ability to respond to crises like this pandemic.

For instance, people today are reacting quite differently than people did in 1969 to the Hong Kong Flu, which killed 100,000 Americans (in a smaller total population): could this be because we’ve watched so many happy-ending productions that we’re ingrained with a belief that bad outcomes can always be avoided if only we recognize and follow the right advice? I’m a product of the TV age too, but it seems to me that people who spent more time on their own life-problems and pursuits and less time watching idealized, imaginary representations of life, constructed by dramatic formulae, would have more realistic ideas about the human condition and more humility about what sort of misfortunes we can hope to avoid.

Drama uses actors, and actors gain success by conveying passionate emotion: usually not so much by showing calmness, civility, or cool-headed practical common sense. Could it be that our spooning this stuff down every day, hours at a time, has contributed to our becoming largely a touchy-feely nation of useless snowflakes, rather than a greatest-generation nation that could roll up its sleeves, make hard decisions, and do the needful?

The bad part of this rumination is: if we’re a nation of drama junkies now, how do we kick the habit? How do we persuade enough people to want to turn off the flatscreen and go do something real? I haven’t got an answer. But if you’re newly married and starting a family, severely limiting screen time for your own kids sounds to me like a good idea.

LAMENT OF PROMETHEUS by John C Wright

John C Wright is one of my favorite contemporary science fiction and fantasy authors. I know, mine and everyone else's, right? And in fact I was late to the party—my interest in SFF had been on hiatus awhile when Wright made his splash debut with his marvelous GOLDEN AGE trilogy at the beginning of the century. In the past five years I've been following his new work while I try to catch up on his early productions, and there seems no danger I'll ever run out of the Wright stuff.

I appreciate about Wright that he brings to his work a broad and deep knowledge of the classics and the ideas that inform western civilization. His intellectual heft is not to be carried away by today's welter of fad ideas, and his stories, full of invention and imagery, deliver the entertainment and wonder that we miss in the dreary Leftist preachments packaged as stories that we get from the Big Five publishers nowadays.

Earlier this year Mr. Wright published a book-length essay that examined a classic of early twentieth century fantasy, one that has received accolades and appreciation in spite of its being particularly difficult to understand—or perhaps because of its very difficulty. I wrote a short review of John C Wright’s long review. Here it is.

I read David Lindsay’s remarkable VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920) long ago, on C S Lewis’s recommendation that it was one of the most evocative fantasies ever written. Thought-provoking it was. I kept returning to memorable parts and occasional complete rereads ever since. The odyssey of Lindsay’s protagonist Maskull takes him through a wild progression of philosophies of life, each seeming like a final explanation of the bizarre world of Tormance until the next one upends it; in reading it I felt bewildered and fascinated, but baffled as to what, if anything, Lindsay was getting at. Perhaps, I supposed, the point was that the world we live in comes with no manual of instructions, and that acting without guidance is the human condition. The imagery and adventures were amazing, anyway.

So I left it, a strange and wonderful book but without any deeper discernible plan than a succession of remarkable episodes, until I read John C Wright’s excellent book-length essay on it. Mr. Wright has evidently also been haunted by Lindsay’s fantastic imagination for many years, but has also brought to it deep scholarship and hard work. His LAMENT OF PROMETHEUS lays out a convincing explanation of how VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS does have a specific point of view, and how every part of the book contributes to an organic whole.

This book gave me a new and clearer understanding of a compelling but obscure classic. I recommend it to anyone who, like me before reading Wright’s essay, admires VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS without understanding it.

My Coronavirus Message

Since January 30, PLANETARY ANTHOLOGY: LUNA has been supplying your family’s literary needs with almost 700 pages of quality fantasy and science fiction stories.

Stories that explore themes of loneliness and despair, madness and dreams: all the mysterious, mythical significance that people have vested upon the Moon.

Because, in the end, people are what really matter.

Now, we will go on as we always have, offering these tales of wonder and triumph to a world that needs their message more than ever before. A world that seems every day more isolated and uncertain.

Although we must remain physically separated in these difficult, unprecedented times, we can still connect with the 22 authors whose stories are collected in this volume—without leaving the safety of our own homes.

We’re here for you. And we will get through this ... together.

Kirk Spock & McCoy Enterprises

(Scene: the board room of Kirk Spock & McCoy Enterprises, an investment firm with offices on the 87th floor of the Empire State Building. Or somewhere like that.)

KIRK: Star date twenty twenty zero three zero nine. The novel corona virus has spread terror through the markets, wiping out in a single morning gains that took (checks notes) months to accumulate. The death toll continues to mount, and every day brings word of new outbreaks, more and more draconian measures to halt the spread of the disease. There is as of yet no cure in sight, and tantalizing hopes of a vaccine remain months away in the most wildly optimistic scenario. I am meeting with my top advisors to plan a strategy for counseling our clients. … Did you get all that, Miss Uhura?

UHURA: Yes, sir. What was that word “star” for at the beginning?

KIRK: “Star”? Did I say “star”? No idea. Strike it out. Well, gentlemen: what is your prognosis.

SPOCK (adjusting his Stefano Ricci tie): The logical strategy for such a situation is indisputable: Buy. The market is now profoundly underpriced. Take advantage of it.

McCOY (staring at SPOCK with wild eyes): I can’t believe this. Are you out of your mind, Spock?! The bottom is dropping out of the market! We have to sell, sell! Sell like there’s no tomorrow! People are dying out there, I tell you!

SPOCK (politely): Will fewer of them die if your clients lose their nest eggs to a bear market?

McCOY: But this virus could crash the world economy! Italy has shut itself down! Practically the whole government of Iran is infected! Schools are making contingency plans to close, factories could shut down to try to contain the contagion!

SPOCK: The most pessimistic forecasts of the pandemic are—if you will pardon the pun—feverish. The mortality estimates we have seen so far are most likely inflated due to our inability to count the total infected population accurately, since many of them develop only mild symptoms. Respiratory illnesses do the most harm in the winter months, and the northern hemisphere is about to enter springtime. The disease appears to be more contagious in less-developed countries with inferior public sanitation infrastructure, and for all these reasons will probably do little harm to the regions responsible for the bulk of the world economy. The epidemic may peak very soon, and when it does the markets will rebound.

McCOY (passionately): And does that do any good for the people in quarantine? Or in the ICU’s?

SPOCK (with heavy irony): McCoy, if I had a cure for the novel corona virus in my vest pocket, I would certainly make use of it to help those people. But, alas (feeling his pocket), I do not have such a thing. Do you?

McCOY: Dammit, man, I’m an investment analyst, not a doctor!

SPOCK (pointedly): So am I. And my analysis is: buy.

McCOY: And mine is SELL, you green-visored Vulcan!

SPOCK: Green-visored what?

KIRK: Never mind. Gentlemen, I think I’ve heard enough. The final decision is mine. And … I know what I’m going to do.

McCOY: And what will that be?

KIRK (turns to the window and gazes for a moment out over the panorama of New York City stretching out before him): We’ll buy.

McCOY: Jim!

KIRK (rounds on him): We have to, Bones! This enterprise has to be guided by the Prime Directive!

SPOCK (quoting): “Buy low, sell high.”

McCOY: To hell with the Prime Directive! (He storms out.)

SPOCK: Jim, may I ask you something?

KIRK (smiling crookedly): What, Spock?

SPOCK: The stock market is essentially an engine for transferring wealth from  excitable investors to more phlegmatic ones. McCoy seems temperamentally unsuited to the profession. I have analyzed our respective performances over the past five years and found that, while my advice has proven correct 70% of the time, McCoy’s has proven incorrect 90% of the time. Why do you keep him as a partner?

KIRK (grinning): I would think you could figure that out with your famous logic, Spock. If I follow your advice, I make money seven times out of ten, is that right?

SPOCK: Yes…

KIRK: But you see, if I do the opposite of what McCoy recommends, I make money nine times out of ten.

SPOCK (raises one eyebrow): Fascinating!



Justin Tarquin: Hope you enjoyed this experiment in transposition of characters. I wish I knew Photoshop well enough to make an illustration ...

Jeff Bezos: fighting the planet's greatest threat

Jeff Bezos made a stir this week, after causing a moment of confusion, with a pledge to donate $10 billion to combat the greatest threat to the planet: socialism.

But he initially misstated the purpose of his grant money as “climate change”, leading to many mistaken reports as journalists hurried to file their stories during the applause between Bezos’s misstatement and the correction.

“Wait, did I say climate change?” said the Amazon billionaire after the hubbub died down, shaking his head and laughing at the obvious blunder. “I’m sorry, how did that come out? I meant to say, to combat socialism, of course. The greatest threat to the planet, du-uh, is socialism. Not—” he made an amused sound like pffft!—“climate change.”

The audience quieted down considerably at the correction, but Bezos went on. “I mean, think about it. Socialism can only exist under an authoritarian government powerful enough to force people to give up their stuff or do whatever the government says to do with it. Obviously, this is a recipe for bad management decisions passing without proper criticism, and hence for irresponsible stewardship of the environment. Which is exactly what we have seen under socialism.

“The greatest environmental disaster on the planet, and it's not even close, has been the destruction of the Aral Sea by the Soviet Union’s misguided diversion of water for irrigation. All the ecosystems of that erstwhile sea and its area have been destroyed. The plains left behind as it recedes are covered with salt and chemical pollutants, carried off by wind as toxic dust storms. The human cost has been enormous.

“Then you have the Chinese Three Gorges Dam. Landslides, drought, disease, millions of people living in its vicinity put in danger, endangered species and whole ecosystems disrupted—even the Chinese government has admitted it was a huge mistake.

“And of course the Soviet Chernobyl disaster, which by any reckoning was two orders of magnitude worse that the roughly contemporary Three Mile Island reactor meltdown in the United States. Estimated deaths came to thousands, a danger zone stretching 20 miles in radius all around the site more than thirty years later.

“Where does nine-tenths of the plastic waste in the oceans come from? Communist China.

“Climate change has been going on since the world began, and the planet has withstood it just fine. I mean, over the two-billion-year history of life on this planet the Sun’s radiance has varied by more than 10 percent. Ten percent! Kinda dwarfs anything you’ll get from carbon dioxide, huh? But socialism, man, that’s bad news from start to finish.

“So I’m proud to donate this money to combat socialism, the greatest threat to the planet,” concluded the world's richest man, ending his remarks to the assembly, where you could have heard a pin drop.   

Number Curiosities

The number 17772 has a property that makes it unique among five-digit numbers: it is the sum of the squares of the five two-digit numbers formed when you read its digits left to right (and cycle back at the end). That is, 

17772= 17x17 + 77x77 + 77x77 + 72x72 + 21x21

Although no other five-digit number has this property, it’s also true that there is a unique five-digit number equal to the sum of the two-digit numbers formed by its own digits reading from RIGHT to LEFT. In other words, there is a unique solution to this “ cryptarithm “ (but note that repeated digits are allowed, so different letters can represent the same digit):

ABCDE = BAxBA + AExAE + EDxED + DCxDC + CBxCB

I found the solutions to both these original problems by using a spreadsheet, and the second one particularly surprised me. Perhaps it will surprise you too.

As I mentioned a couple of posts back, my story ”The Hyland Resolution” in the anthology PLANETARY ANTHOLOGY: LUNA, has a main character who likes number puzzles, and this becomes important in an unexpected way. I hope you’ll pick up the book and enjoy my story as well as all the others!

Clerihews for the Losers

I like to stay hopeful about the future, so it's good to reflect that later this year, someone will lose the election to be the President of the United States. I wrote some clerihews to comemorate the last few losers. Sure, a clerihew is a pretty easy form to write, but what do they want for losing?


1996: Bob Dole

Bob Dole
Lacked a goal.
The Dems would demand what they wanted, and when Bob took the floor,
He'd propose the same thing, but a little less, and cheaper, and slower.


2000: Al Gore

Al Gore
Made 'em snore.
Known for his climate-warming-catastrophe hawking,
Though it unobligingly got cold wherever he was talking.


2004: John Kerry

John Forbes Kerry
Got a great keynote from this other guy, Barry.
Then he 24-7 talked Vietnam,
Till he sounded like a disgruntled-vet version of Miss Havisham.


2008: John McCain

John McCain,
The Times assured us, was broadminded and urbane.
That is, until he got nominated,
Whereafter he was abominated.


2012: Mitt Romney

Governor Mitt Romney
Became his party's nominee.
And campaigned with such chipper politeness,
Even whites were put off by his whiteness.


2016: Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton,
Though marrying a skilled politician was her life's sole noteworthy accomplishment, on
The basis of it, ran for President.
We all know how that went.


Who will be next? No telling. But one thing is certain: you will not find any of my poetry in "The Hyland Resolution", my story in PLANETARY ANTHOLOGY: LUNA. Enjoy!

The Hyland Resolution

Another story of mine is now published! Whew. Now I have two.

The story is “The Hyland Resolution”, and the anthology that includes it (and lots more) is PLANETARY ANTHOLOGY: LUNA, edited by Declan Finn.

I got the germ of the idea that became the story “The Hyland Resolution” about four years ago next month. I remember because I know what sparked it: it was the episode “For The Girl Who Has Everything” of SUPERGIRL, in which our heroine was attacked by a Kryptonian critter called a Black Mercy (because the Kryptonians used it as a humane method of execution). The Black Mercy’s venom or whatever induces a coma filled with dreams that fulfil the victim’s deepest desires, before ultimately killing him—unless he somehow rejects the happy fantasy.

I only watched the first five or ten minutes, because by the end of its first season I had had my fill of this series and was only tuning in occasionally for long enough to see if the basic idea seemed interesting. Sometime if I only see the beginning of a story, I can abstract out the basic problem that drives the plot and think of a completely different way to present and handle it that might make a good original story. (Perry Mason seems to inspire me that way sometimes.)

I’m probably not the only one who does this: this particular episode’s idea has been around the block many times. I see in Wikipedia that the Supergirl writers cribbed it from a Superman comic (“For The Man Who Has Everything”: even thriftily reusing 83% of the title), and my brother tells me there was an episode of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER on the same idea. Declan Finn, our worthy PAS LUNA editor, pointed me to an episode of BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES (a very good series I’d never watched till then) where Bruce Wayne is trapped in a dream in which he had never become Batman, because his parents had never been killed. The Nexus in STAR TREK: GENERATIONS is yet another iteration. How far back does this plot concept go, I wonder? Does it trace back to the scene where Odysseus loses some crewmen to the Lotus Eaters?

I don’t know how the SUPERGIRL writers handled it, though my guess would be that it involved a lot of emoting and sharing of feelings. But as I thought about it myself, I realized two things: first, that I did have an original idea how a person could be snapped out of such a fantasy; and second, that my protagonist would be a mathematician. To say more would be to give spoilers. I drafted a very short piece, set on Earth, about a math professor named Charles Hyland. But my first draft seemed to be lacking vitality; I shelved it without even giving it a title and went on with other things for awhile.

Then Superversive Press called for submissions for its Planetary Anthology series. When Jagi Lamplighter wrote me she was working on Luna, and did I have anything with themes of the Moon, loneliness, madness, dreams, and despair, I remembered my draft and returned to it.

It needed fleshing out, and the themes of the anthology provided direction for how I could proceed. Dreams, check. Madness, well, check. Loneliness and despair? What if my mathematician, Charles N. Hyland (the N is for Norbert, but that never comes up in the story), is a man of many troubles, who uses mathematics as an escape for thinking of things that upset him? The Moon … I moved my setting to a university on the Moon in the early days of its colonization, a university in a Lunar city, established by Christians from Central and South America, fleeing the religious persecution of the increasingly secularized governments on Earth, named El Redentor: Spanish for “The Redeemer”. (None of this comes up in the story, either.) The ubiquitous AI that Hyland consults sometimes, like an advanced web search application, I named Thoth, after the Egyptian god of wisdom, records, and the Moon; and I put in a couple other faint allusions (or Easter eggs) of moony lore.

As for the theme of despair, I pulled in an idea I have about the coming century of colonization of the Solar System, that I think SF writers have short-changed … namely, war. For some reason, as far as I know, everyone seems to imagine that the opening up of vast stretches of new real estate on the Moon and elsewhere will all be handled in as peaceful and orderly a fashion as a session of Congress devoted to voting themselves a raise. On the contrary, to me it seems natural that some spots on the Moon and elsewhere are going to be particularly desirable, and the colonizers will inevitably come into conflict over them and turn to their various governments on Earth to defend their interests. The Moon may be a pretty violent place for its first few decades … plenty of conflict for stories, and excuse for despair.

So how would my absent-minded Professor Hyland deal with wartime emergencies? He’d go through the motions while striving to keep his mind on his mathematics. That could give me a nice opening scene, developing his character in the midst of some intense action. At least for me, the opening scene is good for a chuckle.

By the way, for those who enjoy number puzzles (I can never understand why there aren’t more of us), the story contains one or two, understated and in no way essential to enjoying the story, but solvable. Nothing fancy—rather like figuring out why Spock said there were 1,771,561 tribbles in the grain bin that emptied out over Captain Kirk.

Declan and Jagi liked “The Hyland Resolution”, and then we had a long wait as the production of Superversive Press’s Planetary Anthology series slowed down to a halt, and ultimately the publishing enterprise that had produced a lot of good reading closed its doors. But Tuscany Bay Books picked up the project and has issued Pluto and Luna with a new look. “The Hyland Resolution” is one of 22 stories in this 600+ page volume. I’ve enjoyed the ones I’ve read so far, and I hope you will too.