Read Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 26 for Free Online Page A

sunspots cleared from her vision, Settle could not see the band anymore. The Captain was gone and she was alone in the sea.
    But she knew the sea would not have her for long.
    Within minutes, it glided towards her—the dark shadow of a wave thickening into a vessel, a sleek skulk across the water. A twenty-foot barque, a barbed anchor, its three masts supporting black sheets, the whole ghastly craft preceded by the fearsome figurehead of Poseidon. It scattered dread before it. It was her Ship.
    A rope ladder over the edge invited her. She searched the ship—there was plenty of store, but the only trace of her Captain was the sneer on Poseidon’s face. It was the one sign that her ship had been concealed in the Captain’s dreams. Long Preston had said, stash a ship in the dreams of your true desire. Settle could not have named her true desire at the moment she chose to act, but her heart had known how and when to make the offering. Perhaps if the Captain had known Settle was invading her dreams, perhaps if Settle had been greeted the way that she had greeted Apple, Settle could have hidden not just her ship, but herself as well, the way she had hidden her boy. It mattered little. Her Captain was chasing meteors now with dreams that had no further place for Settle’s ship.
    Apple. She would need help to sail this. Settle smiled to herself, closed her eyes. Within five minutes, Apple came forth and made her ship a fleet.
    “My love!” he halloo-ed.
    “My crew,” she commanded and Apple bowed his head.
    But she would need more to pursue her new desires. When Apple’s schooner had been digested, they set a course for better-travelled waters to recruit a fitting crew for a cruel ship.
    Lady churchill’s rosebud wristlet. Wait. That font’s moving a little fast. How about this one instead? This is Baskerville—which one of our authors, Vincent McCaffrey, requested we use for his novel Hound . That groovy one above is Barbatrick. And, what a trick it is, too. Phew. Helvetica slipped in there for a few words. Naughty, naughty. So, anyway: subscribe to LCRW! E-subs are coming soon to weightlessbooks.com but paper, paper, paper is available now. And soon. And then. And, also: now. Here are your possible improbabilities:
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Reasoning about the Body

Ted Chiang

    Originally delivered as the Guest of Honor speech at Congrès Boréal in Quebec City, May 2010.
    I’m here to talk about science fiction, but I want to begin by describing an idea that anthropologists use, called “folk biology.” Folk biology consists of naïve ideas about the biological world. For example, people used to think whales were giant fish because they have no legs and they live in the oceans. Then we learned that whales breathe air and have warm blood, so we realized that it makes more sense to classify whales as mammals. Another example is thinking of spiders as insects, because they look sort of like insects. But if you look more closely at spiders, you notice that they have eight legs instead of six, and they have two body