ESCAPE POD 193: Props From Mike Resnick

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Resnick's story "Before The Beginning", written with Harry Turtledove, is one of my very favorites. I don't know if this here whole thing was a coincidence or not, but either way... :)

Also, in TEXT form at the late and very much lamented Jim Baen's Universe

'Lotophagi' in FARRAGO'S WAINSCOT #11

http://www.farragoswainscot.com/
Issue #11 is up

Just returned from the woods outside Salem, OR, and SOAK, the Portland regional Burning Man festival. My face and back are so sunburned I am amazed to not be peeling.

SOAK's gonna be hard to write about. I want to keep most of it for now. It was a joyous peeling back of our neurotic civilization, of the kind I had not experienced in some time.

People _can_ live like that. People _can_ be decent and civil to each other and focus on the extraordinary instead of the bottom line. And anyone who tells me differently can, quite frankly, DIAF because I'm so tired of your shit after seeing behind it that I'd like to burn the whole facade.

I worked the gate for one shift, read people's cards, talked to them, listened to their stories and watched the Little Man burn down to ash that folks still tended the next morning... at which point people I had never met before in my life would come up to me with a word of thanks, a smile, or simply a look in their eyes that said they remembered what we talked about and weren't soon going to forget.

The best part about events like that is that they ARE temporary, like Buddhist sand-paintings that the monks blow away when it's time. The idea is to make every day a sand-painting.

The idea is to make more...