Challenge 409

Motorboats on the Styx

In Kyr Bulychev’s “Half a Life”:
1. What is the accurate pronunciation of the author’s name? Why can it not be easily transliterated in English?
2. Why was Nadezhda put aboard the spaceship?
3. What does she say the spaceship resembled?
4. Who ruled the Soviet Union during most of her lifetime?
In Ian D. Smith’s “The Timeless Mr. Thelwall,” do you think Thelwall is right to say that random, everyday events were crucial to shaping the lives of the artists he mentions?
In Mimi Rosen’s “Extraordinary Man,” what justifies the narrator’s act of resistance?
Is Clarise Samuels’ “The Vampire Papers” really about vampires? What might the subtext be?
In Jasmine Silver’s “In the Lobster Pot,” what does Christina imagine as the worst-case scenario?
In John Stocks’ “You Disappear,” what is the difference between natural and human time?
In this issue:
1. How many works in this issue are based on the theme of death or dying?
2. Non-being is irrelevant; death is a mode of being. What different points do the “death” works make about life?