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Friday, February 09, 2018

Rereading... We Haven’t Got There Yet by Harry Turtledove

I have actually had this ebook for some time and read it ages ago, but was in the mood for a bit of Turtledove over breakfast. It’s a short story originally published by Tor.com. Actually, I subscribed to Tor.com because they were advertising free ebooks... and discovered that you could only get those if you lived in the U.S. Sigh! Some sort of copyright issue I don’t understand, though kudos to the U.S for protecting creators’ rights. Pity this doesn’t apply in Australia, where the powers that be keep trying to introduce new laws to take away authors’ rights and get “cheap” books imported here. I still subscribe to Tor for the articles and comments.

Anyway, this must be one of those stories Tor-subscribing Americans got free and it’s now available quite cheaply on iBooks - I think I paid about 99c, always worth it for a Turtledove tale.

William Shakespeare hears that someone has been pirating Hamlet yet again and the performance is on at the Rose next day. Furious, he invites his mates at the pub to come with him next day and let the bastards know what they think of them. Nobody turns up at the theatre, of course and, by himself, he actually has to spend a penny just to get in. At which point there is an amusing double entendre on the slang meaning of “spend a penny.”

The play is Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard - and he loves it! What he discovers when he gets into the dressing room afterwards to congratulate the author(Stoppard isn’t there) I will leave you to find out, but that last line will definitely make you grin. Buy it! 

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