Grimm Reviews – “The Young Giant”

My introductory post.  

“The Young Giant”

There once was a farmer who had a son no bigger than his thumb. (That must have been common thing back then: “Tom Thumb” and “TomThumb’s Travels.”) One day, after the boy cried that he wanted to go with him, the farmer took him out into the field.  A giant came along and picked up the boy and carried him off.

The giant suckled the boy for two years and the boy grew.  The giant took the boy out into the forest and the boy was able to pull a small tree out of the ground.  The giant wasn’t satisfied and suckled him for two more years.  After that, the boy was strong enough to pull an old tree out of the ground.  The giant still wasn’t happy and suckled the boy for another two years.  After that, the boy was able to tear the strongest oak out of the ground without any trouble.

The giant was happy and took the boy back to the field of his father.  The father didn’t think this giant man was his son, but the boy told his father to go home and have his mother fix a large meal.  He then plowed the field by hand.

He went home ate all of his parent’s food, but that barely satisfied him.  So he figured he would need to go on his own.  He asked his father for an iron staff that he could not break across his knee.  His father goes to the blacksmith and comes home with even bigger and stronger iron staffs – the final one requiring eight horses to pull – but the son breaks them all.

So the son goes to apprentice for a blacksmith to make a staff himself.  But instead of being paid, all he asked was to give the blacksmith three blows.  The blacksmith was greedy, and was happy to not have to pay someone.  That is, until he saw how strong the boy was when he drove the anvil into the ground.  To “pay” him for his little bit of work, the blacksmith let him give him a small kick, which sent him over a field.  The boy then grabbed the biggest iron bar and left.

He came to a farm and asked to be a servant, again asking for no wages but to give the bailiff three blows.  So the next morning, all the servants went out to cut firewood, but the boy slept in, saying he would get wood but still be back before all of them.  When he finally woke, he ate a leisurely breakfast, then went to the wood.  At one point, he barricaded the road.  He passed the other servants taking their loads of firewood back.  He ripped two trees out of the ground and loaded them up.  The other servants were stopped at the barricade, and the boy just carried his horse and wagon over it so he made it back before them.

When it came time to be paid, the bailiff was afraid and tried to work out of the deal.  He asked for a short delay and the boy agreed.  After talking it over with some people, the bailiff asked the boy to clean out the well.  When the boy was down there, they rolled a millstone in on top of him, but it didn’t bother boy.  The bailiff then asked him to go to a haunted mill and grind some corn at night.  The boy went to the mill and that night, a table, chairs, and food just walked in.  The boy joined in the meal.  But afterwards, the candles went out and something hit him on the ear.  This continued, so the boy returned all the blows that came to him.

He survived the night, and this cleared up the haunting, somehow.  He took the milled corn back to the bailiff and asked to give him the blows.  The bailiff couldn’t think of another way to distract him and the boy kicked him off into the air.  He then kicked the bailiff’s wife, and the two are floating in the air somewhere.

And the boy picked up his iron bar and left.  The end.

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I don’t know if it’s just me, but I like stories that make sense.  “The Young Giant” does not make sense.  Why did the giant suckle him for six years?  Why did he want an iron bar if he never uses it?  Why instead of money did he just want to kick people?  Was he just a bully?  What was his motivation?  What was the deal with the haunted mill?  When I read this, there was no light-hearted delight you expect from fairy tales, there was just confusion.

“The Future is Coming” is free this week!

As a science fiction writer, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how technology will change the way we live. I came up with ten short essays about science fictional elements that will – almost certainly – one day become science fact and published them as “The Future is Coming” on Kindle.  The point of the essays is that since I’ve spent time thinking about clones and AIs, I feel that I’ll be okay when they do finally show up whereas most people will probably freak out. My hope is these essays will get people to start thinking about the future because, no matter what we do, it’s coming. 

Of course, the only way people will know about these essays is if they get a copy.  To increase the chance of that, I’m running a free promotion now through Friday, April 8.  So you can get some glimpses of the future, just for the price of a click.

Here’s an excerpt from the essay “Cloning Humans.”

Someday – almost certainly sooner than anyone suspects – a human will be cloned. There will be protests, boycotts, marches, condemnations, congressional hearings, etc., all for this one minor event. I say minor event, and here is why.

The short term issues

The biggest problem human clones will face comes from people watching too many bad science fiction movies. In those movies, 99.9% of what they show of cloning is utter crap. In reality, clones will not be mindless automatons who will blindly follow the orders of some megalomaniac out for galactic domination. Nor will you run the risk of walking into an alley where someone will jump you, and ten minutes later a clone will walk out of the alley to steal your identity. And clones will not “remember” the lives of their donors and do … whatever. A clone will just be another human. That’s it. If they can escape the mental scaring caused by “parents” or guardians bent on making them into exact duplicates of the people who donated some DNA, they will be no more screwed up than the rest of us.

Cloning will – especially at first – be extremely expensive. That combined with the fact that we already have over seven billion humans made the old fashion way begs the question, what need is there to create clones? Seriously, what will be the point? Yes, grieving families will want to replace loved ones, and companies will take their money to give them a clone who will have the same DNA as the person they lost. But the clone – because they will have lived a different life – will not be the same person. And yes, some historical figures will be cloned as well as the best and brightest of various fields, but when the Einstein clone takes up poetry instead of physics, what will be the point of continuing?

There will be clones, but they will make up a miniscule fraction of the population. But a ton of legal and ethical questions will surround them. Will the donor of the DNA have all the rights and responsibilities of a parent? What recompense will people have if they are cloned against their wishes? Will the donor be able to abort the clone, and if so, how far into the cloning process will they be able to do that? If the donor is Canadian but the cloning is done in the United States, will the clone be Canadian, American, or have dual citizenship? Will a clone be able to become President? It’s probably a safe bet that few – if any – of these questions will be answered by the time human clones walk among us.

Grimm Reviews – “Tom Thumb’s Travels”

My introductory post.  

“Tom Thumb’s Travels”

I guess this is a different “Tom Thumb” because in this story, Tom’s father is a tailor.  

Tom wants to see the world, so his father gives him a needle as a sword.  He then goes into the kitchen to see what farewell meal his mother has made, but when he leans over to smell it, a blast of steam carries him up out the chimney.

After he landed, he wandered around until he found another tailor to work for.  But his wife didn’t make good food, so after mocking her, she throws Tom out.

He ends up in some woods where he runs into a group of thieves who were going to rob the king and they figure they could use him.  When Tom gets to the chamber, a guard sees him and thinks he’s a spider and goes to squish him, but another guard stops him.

Tom gets into the treasure room and starts throwing the money out a window to the thieves.  The King comes in and sees that some money is missing, but can’t figure out how.  He leaves and Tom continues throwing out the money.  The guards hear something so they rush in but Tom hides under a coin, mocking them that they can’t see him.  They eventually tire and leave and Tom throws out all the money.

The thieves want to make him captain, but Tom still wanted to see more of the world.  He couldn’t find another tailor to work for, so he ended up working at an inn.  The maids didn’t like him because he saw all that they did and reported it to the owners.

So one day a maid was cutting the grass and caught Tom up in the cuttings which she threw into the cows.  One swallowed him whole.

The next day the owner went to have one of the cows slaughtered, and Tom cried out.  The owner heard him, but couldn’t tell which cow he was in.  The cow was slaughtered and Tom managed to miss the knives, but he ended up in a black pudding where he was smoked and hung for the winter.

When the black pudding was eventually cut, he managed to escape.  But as he wandered in a field, he was caught by a fox.  The fox agreed to let him go if he gave him all of his father’s chickens.  Tom’s father was so happy to see his son, he gladly gave the fox his chickens.

The story ends with a sappy bit about how a father would rather have a son than his chickens.

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What kind of treasure room has a window?  And what guards just get tired and leave so the money can disappear.  Maybe they thought it was some magic doing it, but wouldn’t they tell the king so he could counter it?

So Tom spied on the maids?  Peeping Tom Thumb?

So this innkeeper knew Tom was small, and could hear him inside of a cow, but … got bored?  And why didn’t Tom just, you know, eat his way out of the black pudding?

I guess the moral of the story is family is more important than … chickens.  But I think the real moral of the story is, if you can steal from the King, go for it.  Of course, you’d think anyone telling a story like this, back in those days, would have ended up in the dungeon before anyone showed up to write it down.