Subterranean Messenger
I was taking Cassie to the park this afternoon when I saw a package sitting on top of the mailboxes in the lobby.
Package delivery service in my building is… inconsistent. Sometimes they leave things at your door. Sometimes they buzz you and ask you to come down for it. Sometimes you’re home all day and get a package retrieval slip in your mailbox anyway. Sometimes they just leave packages on top of the mailboxes. For thirteen years I have sought to find some method or system to it, but I am now convinced that the building itself must be emitting some sort of reality-warping field that plays havoc with package delivery.
Anyway, I always get paranoid about packages in the lobby. I realize I live in a pretty safe building, but come on, it’s still Brooklyn. Sometimes I get awesome things in the mail, and I would be heartbroken if someone took them.
So I checked. Sure enough, the big yellow bubble envelope is addressed to me. And sure enough, it contains something awesome:
Subterranean Press sent me a beautiful hardcover copy of their new Ray Bradbury short story collection, A Pleasure to Burn. I didn’t even know this project was in the works. Have you ever desired something without even knowing it existed, and then suddenly had it appear atop your mailbox? It’s a weird feeling.
A Pleasure to Burn is a solid 300 pages (unlike the… er, slimmer Great Bazaar), and collects a number of short stories from the world of Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451, including the original novella that spawned the novel. Pretty awesome stuff, and the cover art is great. You can’t see it clearly in my cheap camera shot, but the burning knight’s armor is made of newsprint. I’m psyched to read it in my not-so-copious free time.
I remember reading an interview Bradbury did a couple of years ago, where he said the theme of Fahrenheit 451 was not censorship or free speech, but rather a cautionary tale about the perils of watching too much television. I was really disillusioned about that, but then I realized Bradbury’s intent was kind of irrelevant, since it’s more important what a reader takes from a book than what an author means. And maybe he was just being sarcastic, or the statement was take out of context. Or aliens made him say it.
But I digress. Back to my building’s package distortion field. As if to prove the utter randomness by which it works, after returning from the park, I found a GIANT stack of boxes at my doorstep on the 4th floor:
These are copies of The Desert Spear from Shawn at The Signed Page for me to sign and return for him to send to his customers. If you’re a collector of signed SF books, Shawn’s a guy you want to know.
Hrmm, I wonder if the field around your building leaks through your interwebs….that would sure explain a lot. {muttermutterNetherlandsmuttmermutterTNT}.
The idea of having so many copies of TDS in one spot makes me worried that some sort of Awesome-Singularity will form, causing they and your comics will fall into the void. Which’d suck. You should be more careful in future.
Maybe space them out with Aerospace Engineering text books? …. ‘though I read somewhere that SPAM is quite a good absorber of cosmic rays, maybe that’d work here too?
….
Hope you and Cassie enjoyed your walk in the park!
That distorsion field is an international problem. When we returned from a weekendtrip to Strasbourg we found the box with the i-pod I ordered lieing infront of our appartmentdoor.
On other days parcels are placed by random neighbors or taken back to the postoffice.
“The Signed Page” is a nice idea, but the international shiping rates hurt. 🙁
What would be really sweet is if the distortion was me the space time variety and the next book you write arrived as i have read and re read both your books as has my 14 year old son and we can’t wait for the next instalment. Thank you for a brill, refreshing read in a sea of fantasy fiction.
Fahrenheit 451 is my favorite SF story of all time, with Ender’s Game a close 2nd.