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You can tell it’s spring. Flowers are blooming. Birds are singing. Days are getting longer. And the wind is blowing.
Armand Tremolo stepped out for a breath of air the other day. However, the air in the vicinity happened to be moving about seventy miles per hour.
Unbeknownst to Armand, at the very moment he was perusing the world famous Mogollon skyline, the fragrant spring breeze was removing the cap from his stovepipe.
The stovepipe cap missed Armand’s head by approximately two inches and landed, with a resounding crash, in a pile of scrap metal. Armand bolted, in a blind panic, in the direction of the most immediate assistance he could think of.
"The Libyans have invaded!" he shouted, as he burst through the door of the Bloated Goat, which, being the only public business establishment currently open in Mogollon, contained a good twenty percent of the resident population.
None of the three patrons were inclined to be impressed by Armand’s warning, although it was followed, right on cue, by the boom of an explosion. "See!" shrieked Armand, as he dove under a table.
"Just sounds like blasting at the mine," Joe Malloney replied. "Come on out, Armand. Let me buy you a shot. Calm you down."
Armand crept cautiously out from his hiding place. Just then, there came the report of gunfire from up the canyon. Armand headed immediately for the old mine which serves the Bloated Goat as a cellar.
Joe was now curious. The wind having died down to a mere forty-five miles per hour, he strolled up the road to see what was going on.
The hostilities turned out to be Stella Nevil running the cows out of her garden again. She was cussing a mile a minute while reloading her black powder elephant gun.
Joe shook his head sympathetically and wished Stella good luck. Then he ambled back down to the Bloated Goat. On his way, he noticed the cap was missing from Armand’s stovepipe.
"Hey Armand, wind got your stovepipe cap," he hollered at the cellar door.
"You’re sure it wasn’t the Libyans?" came a muffled reply.
"What would they want with your stovepipe cap?"
Armand did come out. However, he spent the rest of the day checking his stovepipe for terrorist bombs.
Read more samples from the Mogollon News
Winter
The Silver Creek Temperance Society
Blasting
The Balloon
Ice
Halley’s Comet
The Libyan Invasion
A Case of Religion
Politics
Contact SouthernNewMexico.com if you are interesting in publishing Uncle River’s "Mogollon News."
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Uncle has written 9 awesome articles for us. Uncle River's cultural speculative fiction has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Amazing Stories, the British Interzone, and Canada's Transversions, among many others. His story, "Love of the True God," published in Talebones #10, qualified for the Preliminary Ballot for a Nebula Award and was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. As of June, 2002, his "How We Know What Happened" is the cover story of the current Absolute Magnitude #18, and his "My Stolen Sabre" from the Dec. '01 Asimov's is due for reprint in David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer's Year's Best Fantasy #2.
Uncle River is due to appear as a panelist at two SF conventions in Summer, 2002: ReaderCon in the Boston area, July 12-14, and ArmadilloCon in Austin, Aug. 16-18. Trained in Jungian Analysis and holding what he believes to be the world's only earned Ph.D. in Psychology of the Unconscious (Union Institute, 1974), Uncle River has lived as a hermit/writer in the mountain Southwest for the past 20 years.
MOGOLLON NEWS
Set in the real New Mexico ghost town of Mogollon where Uncle River lived for five years, the fictitious "Mogollon News" began as a column in the Silver City Enterprise, at the time New Mexico's oldest continuously published weekly paper, in 1985. The "Mogollon News" ran as a regular feature on Public Radio Station KRWG, Las Cruces, from 1986-90, and has appeared as a column in several regional newspapers. Through the 90s, it was a regular feature in the leading British experimental speculative fiction periodical, BBR. Sufficiently authentic to back-country life that Uncle River's local postmistress wondered why she didn't know the people whose tales appeared in the paper, the complete "Mogollon News" comprises over two hundred stories, like the ones posted here. (Available in book-manuscript format to interested publishers.)
THUNDER MOUNTAIN
Thunder Mountain, (Mother Bird Books, 1213 Durango, Silver City, NM 88061, 189 pp., trade papberback, $11 + $1.50 shipping.) Set in the fictitious Thunder Range of remote Southwestern New Mexico, Thunder Mountain "explores how the land can live and how human spirits can bond with the land" (BBR). Thunder Mountain will show you the difference between an outlaw and a criminal.
"Uncle River transcends mere authorship to become an authentic voice of the abused land." . . . Paul DiFilippo, Asimov's Science Fiction
". . . a new sort of creature, perhaps related to magical realism, which I hope gets positive notice in both of its home worlds - New Mexico regional writing and science fiction...The way the book is structured makes an important read, which is good since the story is pleasant and brings laughter and tears at the right places." . . . Don Webb, The New York Review of Science Fiction XIZQUIL
Speculative fiction, poetry, articles, and art, Uncle River edited XIZQUIL from 1989-98, through 16 issues, winning a Rhysling Award for Year's Best Long Poem from the Science Fiction Poetry Association and placing stories regularly on the Honorable Mention list in Gardner Dozois's annual Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies.
"What better place than the genre of the fantastic to explore new ways of telling stories? XIZQUIL, edited by Uncle River, is firmly pointed in this direction." . . . Michael P. Belfiore, Tangent.
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