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3.35 AVERAGE
3.35 AVERAGE
Skippable early Heinlein (1940's). Three weak novellas and a decent short story. Two of the novellas have bad pacing problems, both starting off with vigorous story then stalling out with interminable exposition. "Lost Legacy" is the better of the two. The multiple worlds novella just never got any traction with me, I couldn't care about any of the characters. The short story "Jerry Was A Man" is the only reason to pick this up, and raised my review a whole star.
One of the other reviewers on here said it pretty well: Heinlein is just too darn readable, even if you can't get past some of his themes and attitudes. So even the long boring crap about supermen saving all us others who are too dumb to take care of ourselves is tolerable for a while longer than expected.
A word first about Bronson Pinchot as a narrator: Outstanding. Especially for Heinlein. He reads the characters as they sound in my head. He sounds older now, too, because he is, of course. And certainly he wasn't going to sound like Balki or Serge, but he really does read well. Extra star.
Heinlein fans and Ayn Rand acolytes will likely enjoy the first story. The Rand folks might start to like the third story, where people who have trained themselves to be exceptional retreat to a Galt's Gulch of sorts within Mt. Shasta, at least until the altruistic stuff starts (this story riffs of the old 'What if Mark Twain was an alien theme. He's not, no one is, but he is exceptional, despite not appearing in the story). I have to admit, Heinlein pulled a fast one on me by diverging from his usual benevolent dictatorship of the super-powered and just writing about people who simply act out of benevolence (though they are super-powered).
The usual pulp-era sexist attitudes on display here, of course, but the female major characters give as good as they get with plenty of sass and brass, for the most part, though unfortunately in the end they seem to want to just get married, though to be fair, they marry someone who is just as exceptional and deserves them and the matches seem more like partnerships, more or less equal, or at least containing mutual respect. The exception is Mrs. Van Vogel in the final story, "Jerry Was A Man," who is already married and very wealthy and has all the moxie to move the story forward despite her useless husband who clearly does not deserve her.
A word first about Bronson Pinchot as a narrator: Outstanding. Especially for Heinlein. He reads the characters as they sound in my head. He sounds older now, too, because he is, of course. And certainly he wasn't going to sound like Balki or Serge, but he really does read well. Extra star.
Heinlein fans and Ayn Rand acolytes will likely enjoy the first story. The Rand folks might start to like the third story, where people who have trained themselves to be exceptional retreat to a Galt's Gulch of sorts within Mt. Shasta, at least until the altruistic stuff starts (this story riffs of the old 'What if Mark Twain was an alien theme. He's not, no one is, but he is exceptional, despite not appearing in the story). I have to admit, Heinlein pulled a fast one on me by diverging from his usual benevolent dictatorship of the super-powered and just writing about people who simply act out of benevolence (though they are super-powered).
The usual pulp-era sexist attitudes on display here, of course, but the female major characters give as good as they get with plenty of sass and brass, for the most part, though unfortunately in the end they seem to want to just get married, though to be fair, they marry someone who is just as exceptional and deserves them and the matches seem more like partnerships, more or less equal, or at least containing mutual respect. The exception is Mrs. Van Vogel in the final story, "Jerry Was A Man," who is already married and very wealthy and has all the moxie to move the story forward despite her useless husband who clearly does not deserve her.
A fairly good set of four stories, or two novellas and two short stories. Read about Gulf in the afterword for Glory Road, and immediately sought it out (I plan to re-read Friday sometime soon). Enjoyed Lost Legacy quite a bit also.
Interesting to see the seeds of other ideas (and even specific lines) that ended up being the foundation for other works. However, Heinlein has never been an author that thrives on brevity and I found myself struggling to get through these short stories.
Lo acabo de releer.... Si, definitivamente lectura para adolescentes, pero entretenida, en particular la última historia, del mono declarado humano (con menos esfuerzo que al robot del bicentenario de Asimov)
Re-reading this book, it's better than I remembered—but Assignment in Eternity hasn't aged as well I hoped. Heinlein's world of the future is still (mostly) very white and male. The few exceptions were probably groundbreaking at the time.
I came across a reference to “Gulf” (the first of four stories in this book) having connections to Heinlein's novel Friday, prompting this re-read. I'm glad I did. These stories all share the themes of what it means to be human, and most of them deal with transcending humanity.
Heinlein's ability to keep a story moving is unparalleled, and this book is no exception. I think there are more Heinlein re-reads in my future.
I came across a reference to “Gulf” (the first of four stories in this book) having connections to Heinlein's novel Friday, prompting this re-read. I'm glad I did. These stories all share the themes of what it means to be human, and most of them deal with transcending humanity.
Heinlein's ability to keep a story moving is unparalleled, and this book is no exception. I think there are more Heinlein re-reads in my future.
adventurous
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
4 of Heinlein early explorations of people's potential combined with his Future History. You can see the basis for his later works (one story is clearly an antecedent for the novel Friday) and underlying all of them are the nature of mankind. As all the stories were written in the 1940s, racial diversity, sexual orientation, and gender identity are not included. Women do have stronger roles than the norm for the time, and one character is a human/chimp hybrid whose humanity is affirmed.
Content Warnings
Minor: Torture, Violence
Assignment In Eternity is from the "golden" part of Heinlein's career before he went a bit mad with power and started writing books without allowing them to be edited (and, unfortunately, decided that sex and incest were irresistible themes). It was one of the first science fiction books I ever read. It's also still one of my very favorite books. As Heinlein books go, it's relatively obscure; undeservedly so, I think.
There was a painting of a naked woman on the cover of my old paperback copy, so I made a book-jacket out of a brown paper bag for it. That's how much of a prude I was. Of course I was...let me see...probably twelve years old or so when I first read it.
The book contains three novellas and one short story. They're among Heinlein's best, in my opinion: classic examples of his early peak period (all of the content of AiE was written in the 1940s).
The novellas include "Gulf", which Heinlein used much later as the background for his novel Friday (which many think inspired the Jessica Alba TV show Dark Angel). It begins as a near-future spy story, and expands from there with some very interesting ideas about human potential, intelligence, and what it means to be a "superman". It includes quite a bit about the work of Samuel Renshaw, a topic which obviously interested Heinlein a lot (much as semantics did). In that regard, Heinlein was rather Campbellesque; he tended to get something of a bee in his bonnet about some new scientific "breakthrough" and include it in his works. Since there are no Renshawing or semantics centers on every street-corner, I think we can say that Heinlein's track record on these particular points was not great (although it was nowhere near as bad as John W. Campbell or Mark Twain, of course).
In any case, "Gulf" is classic Heinlein; exciting, provocative (not in the sexual sense, as this is relatively early Heinlein), and gripping. The ending isn't necessarily happy, and comes with jarring suddenness. For some reason Heinlein didn't use so much as a paragraph break to indicate a discontinuity or passage of time; this was, I think, a mistake that he would not have made later in his career. But still, it's only a minor flaw.
Another novella is "Lost Legacy", in which a doctor, a psychologist, and one of their students at a university discover a way to unlock psychic powers in the human brain, only to find that they're not the only ones with these powers. Because it's a novella, Heinlein gets to develop the characters of the protagonists more than he would in a short story; they're quite likable people. And because this is early Heinlein, the characters aren't constantly having sex and showing their utter moral superiority over anything non-Heinlein.
The development of those powers is extremely well written. You can really place yourself in the story; for all that it's fantastic, it's very believable. Of course, the story is based on the idea that the majority of the human brain has no known function, and my understanding is that that theory has since been disproved. But that doesn't affect the story, which is just a great read. And the end is quite touching.
"Elsewhen" is much closer to pure fantasy, but has a lovely gentle quality. A professor teaches a seminar in which he shows students how to use their minds to move through time and probability to anywhere or anywhen. Inevitably, complications lead to more probability-hopping and transformations.
The professor himself is a bit unusual for a Heinlein protagonist, in that he's actually rather gentle and academic; less, well, "Heinleinish" than most of Heinlein's later heroes, who tend to be virtual supermen in almost every sense of the word. It's worth noting that both "Elsewhen" and "Lost Legacy" feature strong-willed and competent heroines, which was somewhat unusual for that time.
The end of "Elsewhen" always leaves me in a warm glow.
"Jerry Was A Man" is the short story at the end. It's about a rich, not-too-bright woman who is horrified when she learns that enhanced worker apes are being killed and made into dog food when they can no longer work. She brings Jerry, the ape that first caught her attention, home with her (she owns stock in the company that created him). To win basic civil rights for the enhanced apes she employs a legal firm and and a "shyster" (Heinlein's word, not mine). The shyster is rather reminiscent of Jubal Harshaw in Stranger In A Strange Land; in this future setting shysters are essentially smart fixers, beyond the legal pale but necessary to the system. In any case, Jerry is the test case they use to try to establish anthropoid rights.
Along the way her even-more-stupid trophy husband makes difficulties, for a while. There's also some interesting and imaginative discussion of genetic manipulation in the earlier part of the story. I've never thought of Pegasus the same way since I first read it. Neither will you.
Here's the thing that I missed about the story when I was younger, and the reason that I've thought for so long that I should write something about it. The shyster needs a hook, an angle to rouse the emotions of the public in favor of rights for Jerry (the case is, of course, being televised). He sees Jerry dressed in a kilt, and momentarily considers trying to get him to play the bagpipe; obviously he's thinking of trying to make some sort of Scottish connection.
But he discards that, and - unfortunately this is a spoiler, but it can't be helped - instead puts Jerry in jeans and a shabby leather or denim jacket, I can't remember which. And then he gets Jerry to sing "Ol' Man River" in the courthouse, and that makes the case. The audience goes crazy, and "Jerry Was A Man".
Now, I could be wrong, but the implication that I take from that is that the shyster was tying in to African-American culture, as Heinlein saw it at the time. I'm sure that Heinlein was far less racist than most of his contemporaries, but racism was a basic part of the culture back then. A character in "Elsewhen" says that she's "free, white, and twenty-one", if I remember correctly.
And of course there is Heinlein's early novel Sixth Column, with its painful anti-Asian elements (yes, I know that John W. Campbell forced them on Heinlein, but Heinlein DID write them). "He was a yellow man, but he was white inside" still makes me cringe, which may be why it has apparently been removed from later editions of Sixth Column.
The use of the word "shyster" in the Jerry story itself is also an interesting example of the casual racism that was, I believe, quite common throughout much of the United States in the 1940s.
Anyway, I can't shake the thought that Heinlein was basically saying that African-Americans presumably responded because as a chimpanzee Jerry either looked more like them than any other racial group (in his, i.e. Heinlein's opinion), or was somehow closer to them. Perhaps that would be because Jerry's ancestors were presumably also from Africa. But given that the book was first published in 1947...well, I have to wonder. Was the whole hook of the story the idea that Africans look like monkeys, and vice-versa?
I'm honestly not sure! But if not, what could it have been?
Despite that, Assignment In Eternity is one of the most compulsively readable collections of stories by a single author in the field of science fiction. Heinlein was in many ways a modern Rudyard Kipling (just as Kurt Vonnegut was the modern analog of Mark Twain), with all of his gift for storytelling; he captures the reader's imagination from the first page and takes you with him on fantastic journeys. You'll want to make that trip again and again.
There was a painting of a naked woman on the cover of my old paperback copy, so I made a book-jacket out of a brown paper bag for it. That's how much of a prude I was. Of course I was...let me see...probably twelve years old or so when I first read it.
The book contains three novellas and one short story. They're among Heinlein's best, in my opinion: classic examples of his early peak period (all of the content of AiE was written in the 1940s).
The novellas include "Gulf", which Heinlein used much later as the background for his novel Friday (which many think inspired the Jessica Alba TV show Dark Angel). It begins as a near-future spy story, and expands from there with some very interesting ideas about human potential, intelligence, and what it means to be a "superman". It includes quite a bit about the work of Samuel Renshaw, a topic which obviously interested Heinlein a lot (much as semantics did). In that regard, Heinlein was rather Campbellesque; he tended to get something of a bee in his bonnet about some new scientific "breakthrough" and include it in his works. Since there are no Renshawing or semantics centers on every street-corner, I think we can say that Heinlein's track record on these particular points was not great (although it was nowhere near as bad as John W. Campbell or Mark Twain, of course).
In any case, "Gulf" is classic Heinlein; exciting, provocative (not in the sexual sense, as this is relatively early Heinlein), and gripping. The ending isn't necessarily happy, and comes with jarring suddenness. For some reason Heinlein didn't use so much as a paragraph break to indicate a discontinuity or passage of time; this was, I think, a mistake that he would not have made later in his career. But still, it's only a minor flaw.
Another novella is "Lost Legacy", in which a doctor, a psychologist, and one of their students at a university discover a way to unlock psychic powers in the human brain, only to find that they're not the only ones with these powers. Because it's a novella, Heinlein gets to develop the characters of the protagonists more than he would in a short story; they're quite likable people. And because this is early Heinlein, the characters aren't constantly having sex and showing their utter moral superiority over anything non-Heinlein.
The development of those powers is extremely well written. You can really place yourself in the story; for all that it's fantastic, it's very believable. Of course, the story is based on the idea that the majority of the human brain has no known function, and my understanding is that that theory has since been disproved. But that doesn't affect the story, which is just a great read. And the end is quite touching.
"Elsewhen" is much closer to pure fantasy, but has a lovely gentle quality. A professor teaches a seminar in which he shows students how to use their minds to move through time and probability to anywhere or anywhen. Inevitably, complications lead to more probability-hopping and transformations.
The professor himself is a bit unusual for a Heinlein protagonist, in that he's actually rather gentle and academic; less, well, "Heinleinish" than most of Heinlein's later heroes, who tend to be virtual supermen in almost every sense of the word. It's worth noting that both "Elsewhen" and "Lost Legacy" feature strong-willed and competent heroines, which was somewhat unusual for that time.
The end of "Elsewhen" always leaves me in a warm glow.
"Jerry Was A Man" is the short story at the end. It's about a rich, not-too-bright woman who is horrified when she learns that enhanced worker apes are being killed and made into dog food when they can no longer work. She brings Jerry, the ape that first caught her attention, home with her (she owns stock in the company that created him). To win basic civil rights for the enhanced apes she employs a legal firm and and a "shyster" (Heinlein's word, not mine). The shyster is rather reminiscent of Jubal Harshaw in Stranger In A Strange Land; in this future setting shysters are essentially smart fixers, beyond the legal pale but necessary to the system. In any case, Jerry is the test case they use to try to establish anthropoid rights.
Along the way her even-more-stupid trophy husband makes difficulties, for a while. There's also some interesting and imaginative discussion of genetic manipulation in the earlier part of the story. I've never thought of Pegasus the same way since I first read it. Neither will you.
Here's the thing that I missed about the story when I was younger, and the reason that I've thought for so long that I should write something about it. The shyster needs a hook, an angle to rouse the emotions of the public in favor of rights for Jerry (the case is, of course, being televised). He sees Jerry dressed in a kilt, and momentarily considers trying to get him to play the bagpipe; obviously he's thinking of trying to make some sort of Scottish connection.
But he discards that, and - unfortunately this is a spoiler, but it can't be helped - instead puts Jerry in jeans and a shabby leather or denim jacket, I can't remember which. And then he gets Jerry to sing "Ol' Man River" in the courthouse, and that makes the case. The audience goes crazy, and "Jerry Was A Man".
Now, I could be wrong, but the implication that I take from that is that the shyster was tying in to African-American culture, as Heinlein saw it at the time. I'm sure that Heinlein was far less racist than most of his contemporaries, but racism was a basic part of the culture back then. A character in "Elsewhen" says that she's "free, white, and twenty-one", if I remember correctly.
And of course there is Heinlein's early novel Sixth Column, with its painful anti-Asian elements (yes, I know that John W. Campbell forced them on Heinlein, but Heinlein DID write them). "He was a yellow man, but he was white inside" still makes me cringe, which may be why it has apparently been removed from later editions of Sixth Column.
The use of the word "shyster" in the Jerry story itself is also an interesting example of the casual racism that was, I believe, quite common throughout much of the United States in the 1940s.
Anyway, I can't shake the thought that Heinlein was basically saying that African-Americans presumably responded because as a chimpanzee Jerry either looked more like them than any other racial group (in his, i.e. Heinlein's opinion), or was somehow closer to them. Perhaps that would be because Jerry's ancestors were presumably also from Africa. But given that the book was first published in 1947...well, I have to wonder. Was the whole hook of the story the idea that Africans look like monkeys, and vice-versa?
I'm honestly not sure! But if not, what could it have been?
Despite that, Assignment In Eternity is one of the most compulsively readable collections of stories by a single author in the field of science fiction. Heinlein was in many ways a modern Rudyard Kipling (just as Kurt Vonnegut was the modern analog of Mark Twain), with all of his gift for storytelling; he captures the reader's imagination from the first page and takes you with him on fantastic journeys. You'll want to make that trip again and again.
I spent some time a while back reading Robert Heinlein’s published collections of short stories - but I overlooked one, Assignment in Eternity, which was unfortunate because these four stories are among the most memorable of Heinlein’s stories in my opinion - as long as one doesn’t look at them too closely. Unfortunately, what makes them memorable is also what makes them not particularly good stories.
“Gulf” is primarily a spy thriller structured much the same way as a Bond film cold open - it’s only real purpose is to set up the proposition that forms the central part of the story, and the story then ends in a suicide mission in which both protagonists are killed. As a story, it’s rather weak on structure. As an argument, it’s just more of Heinlein’s notions of the manifestation of a superman, but this time, the superman will benevolently rule the others. What it really shows is how easy it is fo that kind of mind candy to corrupt. The punch that holds the nastiness in place is the heroic deaths of the protagonists - and that moment stayed with me for a long time.
“Elsewhen” does much the same thing with its stories of people who have learned how to walk through time. It’s so tempting, to use the power to end up when you are most suited to be. In “Elsewhen,” a man who has learned the secret of changing timelines teaches five of his students how to do the same. One lives a life at a thousand times the speed of their own time line and ends up as a saint in a land where heaven exists much as she expected it. Two end up in a world where there is war, and it’s going badly for humanity - they take military and engineering science there to save their new home. Two find themselves happily in an agrarian, quiet world with just enough technology to be comfortable. When their teacher is charged with murder after their disappearance, he closes the circles by taking some of the agrarian world’s tech to the world at war, and then settling in to spend his last years on the agrarian world, occasionally visiting his former students in the now significantly improved war world. There’s now no way for anyone on the central earth to find him. It’s the ultimate portal fantasy, that can happen for anyone who stumbles upon the trick of freeing himself from living in time. But when it’s finished, all you have left is five people enjoying that perfect fantasy, and all of the conflict is unimportant
Lost Legacy is a novella that again, tells a story that, for all its interesting ideas and wish fulfillment ideas, is not actually much of a story at all. The concept is that once everyone have superpowers. Then a bunch of elitists tried to limit whose powers would be allowed to develop, and the non-elitists, rather that fight, surrendered the field, leaving little secret notes so someday an emerging society could restore the open use of powers. One day, some energetic American discover their powers, connect with other who have been gathering, and starts the war the older nonelitists walked away from. We are given to understand that they will prevail because they are Americans, and are using Scouting to hide their training program. (But only boys, not girls in scouting, because girls don’t matter.)
The final story, “Jerry Was a Man” may have ben so cringeworthy because in it, Heinlein winds himself up to Say Something about black-white relations in America, and he always went way off line when he tried that. It’s the decadent future and wealthy people are big on genetically engineered pets. The useless boy-toy husband of a very wealthy woman wants a pegasus, so she tries to buy him one. He throws a tantrum when he discovers that a pegasus would be incapable of flight unless it were built like a condor - but while he’s negotiating for something that might please him, Mrs. Moneybags notices a sad humanoid worker named Jerry in a cage and discovers that the company euthanises all older engineered workers.
She’s appalled, and because she does own a large section of the company, tries and fails to have the policy changed. The manager and the boy-toy try to manipulate her, first by giving her the right to a permanent leasehold over Jerry, then later by trying to take Jerry back when she decides to go to court for his personhood. This results in a delightful scene where boy-toy discovers that being handsome does not trump betraying your wife and is kicked out. Mrs. Moneybags gets the best legal assistance she can afford, and Jerry sues to have himself and his people declared human enough that they can be held in guardianship but not killed. The sickening part in an otherwise rather funny court scene is when Jerry’s humanity is cinched by his dressing up in faded dungarees and singing Swanee River. Now, admittedly, artists who are powerful and unquestionably the best humanity has to offer, such as, say, the great Paul Robeson, have sung that song so that they uplifted it, rather than being pulled down by its lyrics and images, but the whole image of a genetically enhanced primate gaining a portion (maybe 3/5 ths) of humanity by mimicking a black man disturbs me greatly. Yes, the story’s intent is good. But this is a tonedeaf use of images on Heinlein’s part and it turns much of the good stuff to ashes when you read it.
This particular collection of Heinlein stories is very much one that I wish the rewrite fairy could get her hands on and turn them into the solid stories that lurk inside them.
“Gulf” is primarily a spy thriller structured much the same way as a Bond film cold open - it’s only real purpose is to set up the proposition that forms the central part of the story, and the story then ends in a suicide mission in which both protagonists are killed. As a story, it’s rather weak on structure. As an argument, it’s just more of Heinlein’s notions of the manifestation of a superman, but this time, the superman will benevolently rule the others. What it really shows is how easy it is fo that kind of mind candy to corrupt. The punch that holds the nastiness in place is the heroic deaths of the protagonists - and that moment stayed with me for a long time.
“Elsewhen” does much the same thing with its stories of people who have learned how to walk through time. It’s so tempting, to use the power to end up when you are most suited to be. In “Elsewhen,” a man who has learned the secret of changing timelines teaches five of his students how to do the same. One lives a life at a thousand times the speed of their own time line and ends up as a saint in a land where heaven exists much as she expected it. Two end up in a world where there is war, and it’s going badly for humanity - they take military and engineering science there to save their new home. Two find themselves happily in an agrarian, quiet world with just enough technology to be comfortable. When their teacher is charged with murder after their disappearance, he closes the circles by taking some of the agrarian world’s tech to the world at war, and then settling in to spend his last years on the agrarian world, occasionally visiting his former students in the now significantly improved war world. There’s now no way for anyone on the central earth to find him. It’s the ultimate portal fantasy, that can happen for anyone who stumbles upon the trick of freeing himself from living in time. But when it’s finished, all you have left is five people enjoying that perfect fantasy, and all of the conflict is unimportant
Lost Legacy is a novella that again, tells a story that, for all its interesting ideas and wish fulfillment ideas, is not actually much of a story at all. The concept is that once everyone have superpowers. Then a bunch of elitists tried to limit whose powers would be allowed to develop, and the non-elitists, rather that fight, surrendered the field, leaving little secret notes so someday an emerging society could restore the open use of powers. One day, some energetic American discover their powers, connect with other who have been gathering, and starts the war the older nonelitists walked away from. We are given to understand that they will prevail because they are Americans, and are using Scouting to hide their training program. (But only boys, not girls in scouting, because girls don’t matter.)
The final story, “Jerry Was a Man” may have ben so cringeworthy because in it, Heinlein winds himself up to Say Something about black-white relations in America, and he always went way off line when he tried that. It’s the decadent future and wealthy people are big on genetically engineered pets. The useless boy-toy husband of a very wealthy woman wants a pegasus, so she tries to buy him one. He throws a tantrum when he discovers that a pegasus would be incapable of flight unless it were built like a condor - but while he’s negotiating for something that might please him, Mrs. Moneybags notices a sad humanoid worker named Jerry in a cage and discovers that the company euthanises all older engineered workers.
She’s appalled, and because she does own a large section of the company, tries and fails to have the policy changed. The manager and the boy-toy try to manipulate her, first by giving her the right to a permanent leasehold over Jerry, then later by trying to take Jerry back when she decides to go to court for his personhood. This results in a delightful scene where boy-toy discovers that being handsome does not trump betraying your wife and is kicked out. Mrs. Moneybags gets the best legal assistance she can afford, and Jerry sues to have himself and his people declared human enough that they can be held in guardianship but not killed. The sickening part in an otherwise rather funny court scene is when Jerry’s humanity is cinched by his dressing up in faded dungarees and singing Swanee River. Now, admittedly, artists who are powerful and unquestionably the best humanity has to offer, such as, say, the great Paul Robeson, have sung that song so that they uplifted it, rather than being pulled down by its lyrics and images, but the whole image of a genetically enhanced primate gaining a portion (maybe 3/5 ths) of humanity by mimicking a black man disturbs me greatly. Yes, the story’s intent is good. But this is a tonedeaf use of images on Heinlein’s part and it turns much of the good stuff to ashes when you read it.
This particular collection of Heinlein stories is very much one that I wish the rewrite fairy could get her hands on and turn them into the solid stories that lurk inside them.