His entry begins:What am I reading? I’m glad you asked. I’m reading the January 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.About Survivors Will Be Shot Again, from the publisher:
Why am I reading it? Because I was looking through a stack of paperbacks, and there it was. It’s a digest magazine, so I don’t know what it was doing in the stack.
The fact that it was there is not the only reason I’m reading it, though, or even the main one. The real reason is that I read the entire issue back in 1958 when I bought it off the rack in The Corner Book Store in Mexia, Texas, and I wanted to see if I remembered any of the stories and to see how they held up for me.
Let me tell you about two of them. The first is “Remembrance and Reflection” by Mark Clifton. I didn’t remember the story, but what I did remember is that it’s the fourth and final story in a group based on a couplet from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man: “Remembrance and reflection how allied! / What thin partitions sense from thought divide!” The three previous stories had appeared in a different magazine, Astounding Science Fiction, and I don’t know why the fourth one turned up in F&SF. I’m sure that would be a good story in itself. What I do know is that while I wasn’t at all familiar with Alexander Pope when I started reading the stories, I did like the couplet. I memorized it at the time, and I’ve thought of it often in the years since. The story, like the others in the series, is about a personnel director who works for a company called Computer Research and who finds himself hiring people with psychic powers. In this final story he discovers that he can’t quite sort out his thinking about those powers and about science and fit his thoughts into new framework. His life is changed, and he suffers...[read on]
Life is never easy for Sheriff Dan Rhodes. Even in a small Texas county, there's always something going on for a sheriff to look into, whether it's anLearn more about the book and author at Bill Crider's website and blog.attempted robbery, a marijuana patch guarded by an alligator, or a murder. This time the murdered man seems to be connected to a string of recent burglaries, but just how isn't easy to figure out. It takes some time and another murder before Sheriff Rhodes discovers the answers.
Survivors Will Be Shot Again, Bill Crider's latest installment in the critically-acclaimed Sheriff Dan Rhodes mystery series, finds Rhodes dealing with murders, thefts, marijuana, and gators in Clearview, a small Texas town where secrets are easier to keep than you might think.
Read the Page 69 Test entries for Crider's A Mammoth Murder, Murder Among the OWLS, Of All Sad Words, Murder in Four Parts, Murder in the Air, The Wild Hog Murders, Murder of a Beauty Shop Queen, Compound Murder, Half in Love with Artful Death, and Between the Living and the Dead.
Learn about Crider's choice of actors to portray Dan Rhodes and Seepy Benton on the big screen.
The Page 69 Test: Survivors Will Be Shot Again.
Writers Read: Bill Crider.
--Marshal Zeringue
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