Hey There,
I was in Orlando for a week and then it took me a week to get caught up again.
One thing I noticed about the the Happiest Place on Earth is that it is stinkin’ hot in June. And humid. The kind of humid that makes you feel like that guy in the deoderant commercial that has arm pits that could be mistaken for a firehose. It was really hard to remember how happy I was with the spots swirling in front of my eyes. The people who worked there did not seem to sweat at all. Maybe that is why they call it the Magic Kingdom.
So, while I was walking around in the heat I kept having this memory of a short story, or maybe it was just the preleast of the first chapter of a novel, that I read in 1989. It might have been in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, but I can’t really recall. Anyway, there is just a one paragraph description of a robot that is crawling alon the road, tearing up the black top because nobody uses road any more. The all fly around in hover craft. Any way, this robot crawler has big claws and it is just moving along the nation’s roads chewing them us and spitting them out. I guess the recurring vision was induced by the fumes from the semi-liquid asphalt. Actually I have thought about that paragraph in the story repeatedly over the last 20 years. I have no idea what the rest of the story was about or who the author is.
That is I had no idea. On my way to Houston yesterday I plugged in my non-ipod very unhip mp3 player and noticed that I had some new podcasts. I started listening and suddenly, there is was. The robot asphalt eater that had been haunting my dreams and hallicunations for 20 years! The novel is by Patrick Kelly and is called “Into the Sun.” You can download it free from his web site.
Weird, huh? I think I’m gonna lie down now.
