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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: A female astronaut heads off to the stars, leaving her philandering husband behind. But eventually she has to come home. Thanks to relativity, only seven years have passed for her, while her husband has aged thirty years. How will he greet her when she touches down on Earth?

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Men Writing Science Fiction as Women, ed. Mike Resnick, 2003
Fictionwise Release Date: December 2004

74 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [195 KB], eReader (PDB) [25 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [11 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [11 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [73 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [81 KB], hiebook (KML) [35 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [40 KB], iSilo (PDB) [9 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [12 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [39 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [19 KB]
Words: 3092
Reading time: 8-12 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

You can't have brothers without being familiar with Planet of the Apes. I'm not talking about the "re-imaging" done by Tim Burton, apparently much ballyhooed in its day, but the Franklin J. Schaffner original--the one that's stood the test of time, the one that, even a hundred years after it was made, boys still watch.

Of course, one of the reasons boys enjoy it is it's very much a guy film. Oh, there had been a female astronaut along for the ride with Chuck Heston, but she died during the long space voyage, leaving just three macho men to meet the simians. The woman ended up a hideous corpse when her suspended-animation chamber failed, and even her name--"Stewart"--served to desexualize her.

Me, I liked the old Alien films better. Ellen Ripley was a survivor, a fighter. But, in a way, those movies were a cheat, too. When you got right down to it, Sigourney Weaver was playing a man--and you couldn't even say, as one of my favorite (female) writers does, that she was playing "a man with tits and hips"--'cause ole Sigourney, she really didn't have much of either. Me, I've got not enough of one and too much of the other.

I'd had time to watch all five Apes films, all four Alien films, and hundreds of other movies during my long voyage out to Athena, and during the year I'd spent exploring that rose-colored world. Never saw an ape, or anything that grabbed onto my face or burst out of my chest--but I did make lots of interesting discoveries that I'm sure I'll be spending the rest of my life telling the people of Earth about.