Uncle River

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Mogollon, New Mexico, is one of the West's classic ghost towns. Gila Wilderness out the back door. Rural land use politics. Dark canyon winter. Summer tourists. Originally a regional newspaper and Public Radio feature, the news is fiction. But the tales are authentic enough that River's local postmaster wondered why she didn't know the people whose daily lives the Mogollon News recounts.

Thunder Mountain is a novel of magical realism by former Western New Mexico University professor and eccentric mountain man, Uncle River. Set in the mythical southwestern New Mexico mountain town of Elk Stuck, the book details mundane and mystical events that revolve around the main character, drifter Harry Upton, and his quirky, adopted family.

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A nuke, thankfully abortive, or a line of them hidden, to blow up Panama. To save the world from an Ice Age, when Global Warming stops the Gulf Stream. Who does such things?

What if suicide bombings are not about hate after all? Not about ideology, nor any particular religion? Not even about despair at society's bottom? What if the bombers are better enough off to emerge from the other side of despair, expressing an idealism that forgets to be human? Is this what motivates Shandra Stuart and her motley group?

It isn't the politics the media reports -- the U. S. taking back the Panama Canal. Nor social and economic history that leads to the convergence of politics and Shandra's group on the Panamanian Isthmus.

"We are taken step by step, with some tangential diversions along the way, through the life of Shandra Stuart—from her childhood in the refugee camp, the young woman who escaped her trailer-park-hell life to university and then to her decision to explode a nuclear device. . . a compelling, if a little odd, novella."

— I. E. Lester, The Internet Review of Science Fiction

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Prometheus, ancient Greek God of Consciousness, long tortured for the crime of compassion to human beings, is now free to give us his view of the history of Western Civilization. Myth, language of the psyche, before the insurance market ate psychology, need not succumb to a choice between living possessed by fundamentalist fanaticism or soul death of solipsistic fad. The individual is a central figure of our culture's mythos. Prometheus is a voice who articulates the experience of the individual, out of our peculiar cultural history, which both demanded the individual and persecuted the consciousness that is the individual's defining feature.

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These stories, wise, witty, and offbeat takes on the stranger "what-ifs" of human nature, come from the pen of Uncle River, hermit and occasional prophet of the SF world. Conceived in the sparsely populated American Mountain Southwest, where loners, rugged individualists, and small, eccentric communities live close to Nature and formulate alternative, sometimes surreal codes of existence, River's tales are narratives of laconic power, visionary yet saturated with the colors and sounds of real places, real people, the dreamers of New Mexico...

Many of these pieces come from a time when River lived in utter solitude, not writing until his last sighting of another human being lay days in the past. There were no noisy distractions: no phone, no TV or radio, no Internet connection, not even a music machine. The quieter world of our ancestors: yet now, to almost all of us, quite alien. A world of woods, which talk quietly to themselves, in a way neither mystical nor sentimental; of small animals, which announce the presence of larger creatures: deer, bears, humans... And yet this is the world also of space ships, computers, urban billions--what common realm, what wide universe, can such different realities share?

Congruities and incongruities, daily experience and its dimension of dream: these tales have appeared in such publications as Analog, Asimov's, Amazing Stories, and The Year's Best Fantasy.

". . . thoughtful, often optimistic stories of depopulated and low-tech futures. . . River's slow-paced perspective will challenge readers to stop and reflect on just what kinds of worlds are worth building."

— Publishers Weekly Starred Review

"Although many of the stories are more mainstream than speculative fiction, all share River’s penchant for letting his quirky creativity guide each tale to its often surprising denouement, with mostly engaging results."

— Carl Hays, Booklist Online