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Some aspects of the lives of Stella Gibbons and Stella Benson were compared in the post that marked their birthdays.
There are a few more associated birthdays to mention.
Stella Benson shares the day of her birth, January 6th, with SF writer Eric Frank Russell and engineer/ businessman John DeLorean.
January 6th is also said to be Sherlock Holmes’s birthday.
Stella Benson shares the year of her birth, 1892, with J. R. R. Tolkien, who was born a few days earlier.
Incidentally, Lucy M. Boston was also born in 1892, as was Basil Rathbone, the actor who played Holmes in major Hollywood films.
By coincidence, both Tolkien and Rathbone were born in South Africa.
Sherlock Holmes is deduced to have been born on January 6th 1854:
There are two very amusing short stories that I feel impelled to re-read from time to time. One is Plus X by Eric Frank Russell, the other is Bad Medicine by Robert Sheckley.
Plus X was written by an Englishman, Bad Medicine by an American. Both stories were first published in 1956, in the classic pulp science fiction magazines Astounding Science Fiction and Galaxy respectively.
Plus X is about a human prisoner of war on an alien planet; Bad Medicine is about a homicidal maniac in New York. Both men use psychological methods to escape their condition.
I don’t want to be a spoiler, so will say only a little more about the stories.
Plus X by Eric Frank Russell
John Leeming is the hero of this story. He is a prisoner of war, captured by a reptilian race. He escapes by fooling the enemy, persuading the reptilians that earthmen and their alien allies have invisible, and dangerous, companions.
For me, one of the best scenes is when one of the enemy aliens interrogates another earthman prisoner - who knows nothing about Leeming’s lies - about these companions to get some independent confirmation. This man has no idea what his captor is talking about, but manages to give very good answers that confirm the story.
He says, “Where did you get this information?”, and when asked whether the invisible companions might manage to take over some of the reptilians, says with great menace, “I wouldn’t be surprised.”
It is all very amusing and very clever.
