Some Annotated Reading February 29

I managed to finish another book this week, On Earth as It is On Television by Emily Jane. Terrific book, and I now have a thought about humor in fiction. Which I may have had before, but, if so, this book really illustrates it. Humor must support story. Perhaps it is another element of fiction.

Flora Mancuniensis: The study of botany in 19th-century Manchester by Julie Ramwell is a terrific piece of historical writing. It appears at a publication on the Medium platform called Special Collections from The University of Manchester in England. This is an example of the neat things that can be done at Medium. 

I did some reading of time travel short stories:

• The Men Who Murdered Mohammed by Alfred Bester in Fantasy & Science Fiction, October, 1958 pg. 118. I heard this would be funny, and it probably would have been much funnier if I had more of a science background. This was clever, though, with good narrative drive and some clever time travel stuff.
• The Clock That Went Backwards by Edward Page Mitchell.  Scroll down. Yeah, not an exciting read. This is believed to be the first instance of a device being used for time travel. So now I can say I've read that.
• The Man Who Walked Home by James Tiptree Jr. in Clarkesworld. This is both a time travel and post-apocalypse story, two sub-genres that I'm not fond of. But for some reason I found this pretty riveting, and it leads me to want to learn more about the author, a woman writing under a man's name.
• And I did! The Most Prescient Science Fiction Author You Aren't Reading by Kay Steiger in Vox.

New Yorker humor you won't be able to read: Why People Who E-mailed You Aren't E-mailing You Back, By Week  by Hallie Cantor