Current reading for winding-down time: It Came From the Trailer Park!
It's... well... pick a bunch of authors with varying backgrounds and give them the anthology title, and you get quite a variety of yarns. Mostly good fun. Mostly very imaginative.
But, in some of the stories, technical details leap out at me. Setting off ANFO with a shoelace? Nope. Water moccasins in Watts Bar Lake? Doesn't sound right, and it's well outside the recognized range of the species. A four-ounce slug from a .410 revolver? That doesn't sound right at all; a quick DuckDuckGo suggests a missed reciprocal*.
Ah, well. Authors really should learn that some details are best skipped over, and others can be easily looked up. But, if one can ignore the little inaccuracies and enjoy the sweeping fantasies, it's worth a read.
Yeah, yeah: pedantry.
Oh, and the chainsword? Yeah! Another thing to make, In My Copious Free Time. Maybe a little less rednecky than the one described....
Update: One of the stories is "Von Neumann's Cyclone", by Michael Gants, wherein rednecks of all races battle a tornado made of escaped Von Neumann probes. And what do I see in the news, the morning after reading that tale? Self-replicating robots, that's what! But not to worry; these are Organic, and therefore Good - not like the Monstrous Mechanical Metal Munching Moon Mice of 1960, or the metal-eating cockroaches of the trailer-park yarn.
* .410 slugs only run 100-ish grains? Quarter-ounceish? At around 1800 FPS from a shotgun-length barrel; presumably rather less from a revolver. Consulting handy reference material, a .41 Magnum throws a heavier bullet, faster, from a more convenient package, as does a .357 Magnum. But I guess there's a market for big, ungainly revolvers that take big, impressive-looking shells.
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