Edition 8 2025, Auguts
Editor's note At this point, we had actually intended to present you with the continuation of Harlan Finch's research on Widow Creek. The first two articles captivated us—and many of you. However, the promised continuation has not arrived.
Editorial Note The editorial staff received the following essay from a local student, along with the margin notes of his teacher and the final grade. The student asked us to publish it together with the comments and the grade – in his own words: “If you also find it at least questionable that I was punished with an F for my response to a book with a topic like The Giver, then I ask you to publish my essay and my teacher’s comment – if you dare.” Well, we all read it together during a break in our editorial meeting – and the wide range of different and unexpectedly intense reactions and discussions it triggered convinced us to publish it – precisely because we know how controversial it will be – and to use the teacher’s own words: “and why that is important.”
Excerpt from the Almost Complete Guide to Decay, Disorder and the Question of Whether That’s Really a Bad Thing, 2nd corrected edition Entropy Noun | /ˈɛntrəpi/ The measure of how much everything tends over time toward disorder – including your drawers, your to-do lists, and your hairstyle.Often described as “chaos increases,” which sounds dramatic but is about as precise as saying “water is kind of wet.” In thermodynamics, entropy describes the statistical probability that systems move from an unlikely (ordered) state to a more likely (disordered) one. In practice, that means: a puzzle will never sort itself, but it will reliably fall apart if you shake the box hard enough.
I have my own opinion on this, which is also reflected in part in readers’ reactions: as much as I enjoy an interestingly “constructed” world, for me it always develops primarily out of the interplay between the characters, the story, and the larger themes of my books. The basic idea of the Space World was a world like our own, with only one fundamental difference: the existence of the Space (probably—though no one can really prove it 😉 ).
How it feels to finish a trilogy – and at the same time open the next door To end a trilogy in the Space World series feels as if I were Scheherazade telling 1001 Nights – every ending is the beginning of a new idea. With Continuum, the No Brainer trilogy ends. And at the same time something new begins. The threads that were spun in Dire Contact, the cracks that opened in Space Time – all of this comes together here. Answers appear, but more questions emerge: bigger, more dangerous, more personal. What if the enemy is not an enemy at all? What if time itself has a blind spot? And what if that is precisely where the truth lies?
Why energy-saving lamps don’t save the world – but make us compliant Everybody talks about light pollution, about sustainability. About saving. About “we all have to do something.” And yes – that is real. In our cities, the stars are drowned out by the glow of neon lights, billboards, and streetlights. Who among us hasn't dreamed of seeing the night sky again as it really is? The solution? Supposedly: energy-saving lamps and LEDs. But: whoever takes the trouble to look more closely quickly realizes that something is wrong here.
“Calm down!” Instead of counting to ten, I think about where this sentence ranks on my list of most hated phrases when I'm stressed. As if I could calm down with what I have on my to-do list, where I have to do A, B, C, or H-M next. I don't want to do any of them, but I feel like I have no other choice — which, when I think about it, has always been the main source of stress for me: the feeling of having no choice. Is that right? Is the root of the stress problem the feeling or the actual circumstance of having no choice? That strikes me as odd at first, when I think about my overloaded to-do list. That's what causes the stress, right? Too many tasks and responsibilities and deadlines – exactly, and far too little time. But what if... I had a choice?
There are books I read for the characters. Others, for the suspense. And then there are those that carry me into a world so vividly that I feel the chimney smoke and the street smells still clinging to me long after I close the book. The Sir John Fielding series by Bruce Alexander belongs, for me, in this last category.