This is possibly the most remarkable news story to hit the wide brown land since, well, the original one of the FUCKING DANGEROUS NUCLEAR OBJECT being lost in the first place.
The amount of road they had to cover in order where the thing was lost is apparently equivalent in distance to the entirety of the UK mainland. Yikes. The discovery of this miniscule (see above) thing is understandably compared to finding a needle in a haystack, with the obvious difference being that needles generally don’t need twenty-metre containment around them because needles generally put out absurd amounts of radiation that could, you know, cause grievous bodily harm. And apparently the maximum penalty for losing this thing is only one thousand dollars. Rio Tinto’s lucky there’s probably next to no one out there to chance upon it… well, maybe apart from some indigenous folks, and we know how much of a shit Rio Tinto gives for them…
Anyway, at least we know where it was, but personally I’m also a little concerned that they’re not even sure sure when the thing was lost… that was a detail I was unaware of until I read the story of its rediscovery, they reckon some time between the 11th and 16th of January, and then they didn’t announce it until the 25th. Apparently that’s when Rio Tinto found out themselves that Baby Chernobyl was missing… or, at any rate, that’s when they said it was. Rio Tinto are a pretty shit company, we know that, and I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to discover down the track that they knew much earlier and tried to cover the thing up until something forced them to admit it…
Book #2 for 2023, continuing with the LOA 1950s SF collection. This was an expansion of a novella called “Baby is Three” which was published in 1952 (the novel following in ’53), with that original story being the middle part of the novel and two other new sections surrounding it, the first part being backstory and the third part being what happened next. I’ve not read the original (nor indeed anything else by Sturgeon except “Microcosmic God”), so I’m left wondering what if anything he did to fit it in with the two new parts… cos, taken by itself, I’m not sure it makes an awful lot of sense, at least not as it stands in the book. Then again, other critics have noticed the multi-part structure mirrors the “gestalt” theme of the plot, where each part depends on the others to add up to the whole and isn’t enough by itself… maybe so, I’m just not sure that it actually does that, I don’t know if it does cohere fully. On the plus side, it does achieve a reasonable feat by making its superhuman entity interesting and indeed kind of sympathetic, unlike, for example, Stanley Weinbaum in The New Adam…
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