Literary Gems and Best Sellers

Shirley van Eyssen (neé Simmons, adopted by Goulden) published her first best seller, Flak, at age 15:

1. Flak by Shirley Goulden
2. Out of this World by Shirley Goulden
3. Royal Reflections by Shirley Goulden
4. Animal Stories
5. The Adventures of Pinocchio by C. Collidi -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
6. Tales from Hans Andersen -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
7. Stories from Hans Andersen -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
8. Tales from Arabian Nights -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
9. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
10. The Sleeping Beauty and Other Stories by C. Perrault -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
11. Cinderella and Other Stories by C. Perrault -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
12. Snow White and Other Stories by Grimm -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
13. Stories from Grimm -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
14. The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
15. Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
16. More Tales from Hans Andersen -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
17. Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
18. Chinese Fairy Tales -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
19. Tales from Japan -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
20. Tales from Russia -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
21. Stories from Africa -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
22. A Thousand and One Nights -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
23. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
24. Fables of Aesop and La Fontaine -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
25. Stories from the Bible -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
26. Tales from Shakespeare -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
27. The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
28. Rip van Winkle -- Retold by Shirley Goulden
29. The Splendour Book of Ballet by Shirley Goulden

Shirley has also recently finished I am Jack, a "factional" biography of Scottish-Canadian Dr Thomas Neill Cream, a Victorian physician hanged in London as a serial killer of prostitutes. You may have heard of him before under what is, probably, the world's  most infamous pseudonym. 

She is currently working on the third volume of a trilogy, a sweeping saga of life, times and adventures in George III's London, Colonial America and Europe under Napoleon.

Nothing if not eclectic, she is also responsible for editing the correspondence  and journalistic memoirs of  Ami Black P. Katt and Amber P. Katt, two feline sisters who combine their unusual talents  to get the story, wherever and whenever it happens to happen.

Ami's first letter appears below:

Ami Black P. Katt's Page

A Teleport too far!

London, England, 8 May 2000: By Ami Black P. Katt

A while back my sister, Amber  (that is, Amberzine P. Katt, but we usually call her Amber, 'cause she looks like one of those big lumps of amber embedded with Jurassic flies carrying dinosaur blood in their guts) and I were fooling around in the stc [space time continuum, Ed.] gathering material for our memoirs when something went wrong and she didn't rejoin me in this era.  She probably messed up something in figuring out the FitzGerald-Lorentz contractions. I know it wasn't my fault but she will probably claim it was when she gets back to now, or here, or whatever.  I miss her and  would even own up that it was my fault if she would just come back.  The thing is that she thinks she is such a great mathematician and I keep telling her that means nothing if you don't get the right answer because you messed up the arithmetic.

I remember Bertie's [Albert Einstein's, Ed.] cat telling us how she divided by zero and it came out that the Universe (the local one, that is) would expand forever instead of being as flat as a board as everybody knows -- now.  But I digress.  I should tell you that I handle [transportation] (at least the teleport part of it, a kind of motor pool sergeant, like Bilko ) and Amber does the time-side of our travels.  Not just the clockwork so we know when we are, but she can actually move us to and fro in time, eg back to the time of the dinosaurs, or ahead to the Colonial Wars on Beta Centauri Prime.  The trouble is since everything about is moving around you have to compute when you want to be as well as where  you want to be ... there.  For example, if you move six months ahead you will wind up with London on the other side of the Sun from where it (and you) were when you started.  And, of course, London and the rest of Earth have been dragged along with the Sun on its way around the Galaxy, and the Galaxy has moved with respect to the local group and the (local) Universe has expanded somewhat... and so on and on.  The calculations are very complicated and prone to error, so Amber has taken to using Computer Aided Time Travel   (She calls it CATT.  and I call that vanity, 'cause our last name is Katt, spelled with a "K" of course), using a program she wrote herself.  She uses Bogcie's (Big Ole Grey Cat's, Ed) computer, which she learned to manipulate almost as soon as we went to live with Bogcie and Marma (short for Marmalade) to run her CATT program. 

Auntie Truffle, who actually placed us with Bogcie and Marma, taught her how to time travel, and taught me to teleport, but Amber discovered how to get into the computer [to] get out onto the Internet for herself.  She has tried to explain about the CPU and the registers, APU [arithmetic processing unit, Ed.] and the logic gates and all that stuff: But, all I could take in is that by nudging certain tiny bunches of electrons in certain directions while keyboard is doing input you can make the CPU think somebody is typing whatever you want it to think.  Voila, you have it under your control.

Electrons are very small and easy to nudge, even in fairly sizable bunches.  Amber found out that by building up a store of them in two small patches of hair just above her eyes (looks like normal grooming to me) and setting them up to oscillate (bounce back and forth in unison) she could use her whiskers as aerials to focus an electric field onto just the right area of the CPU to type in anything she wants. She says Ernie's  [Ernest Schrödinger's, Ed] cat taught her do it just before she died, or didn't die.  Anyway, it took her weeks to teach me how to do it too.  Thank goodness we succeeded before this latest misadventure; else I should really have no way to even try to regain contact with Amber.

That is why I am putting this story on the Web.  Maybe Amber will pick it up whenever she is, work out a way to get me a message, and we can work together on joining up again.  I am also sending this email to her website (amberzine.co.uk).  There is even a chance that someone else will have a solution or something I could try.  If you do, you can contact me by using the Amber Search Form [Now Contact Us, Ed]. 

 London, England, 31 May 2003: By Bogsie.

I have read Ami's article, which I did not understand as Amber has been with us at home most of the time. When I asked Ami for an explanation, she said that Amber made a mistake in arithmitic and teleported a copy of herself [Amber2] to the Ur continent   (the continent which existed three billion years ago, a long time before the Ur city was founded in Mesapotamia, about 4,000 years ago). 

The copy here of Ami1 is in the Mesapotamian Ur [Ami2], and Amber2 is unable to intercommunicate with Amber1, Ami1 and Ami2 because nobody knows exactly what mistake Amber1 made, so they don't knowher exact address (time and place) of Amber2 in the Ur continent. 

I asked Ami to find out what she could about superimposition, so that Amber can be in Ur and here at the same time. I had heard that electrons would behave that way, but not a full sized cat.

Hawkinge, England, 31 October 2009: By Ami1.

Superimposition also works for organisims, according to Mohan Sarovar's cat. It is also possible that the superimposition with Amber2 could not be maintainable in the old Ur; because there are not enough (or any) "biological organisms that exploit strange quantum behaviors" there already. To be continued.