Today is November 8. It is the birthday of Bram Stoker (1847-1912) and Ben Bova (1932-2020).

Abraham Stoker will forever be known as the author of Dracula. That is not a bad thing. But he also wrote a few other novels and some short stories.

My favorite of his short fiction is “The Squaw”.  I first read itwhen I was in junior high school in a book about comics I found in the public library. I don’t recall the title of the book. It was a black-and-white story, probably from Creepy or a similar publication.

The story concerns a man who driops a stone from a height in an attempt to get the attention of a kitten that is playing with its mother. He accidentally hits the kitten, killing it.

The man is part of a group of tourists. They go into  a room in which there are a number of torture instruments, includiing an iron maiden.

The mother cat follows them in…

It’s a nice, grisly little tale.

Ben Bova wrote science fiction of the hard variety, much fo it dealing with space exploration. He was working on a trilogy in his Grand Tour series that focuses on the outer planets, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto (which is a planet, dang it).

I listened to a collection of his short fiction earlier this year while driving back and forth to the university. It had been a long time since I had read any of his work. I’m going to try to put more of his stuff into the rotation. I’d read some of the Grand Tour books a while back, like a couple of decades. I want to read through them in sequential order. Some of the last few entries in the series involved leaving the solar system.

Another series of Bova’s I’d like to read is the Orion series. I think I read on e of the original novellas in Analog when I was in high school.