I don’t believe that I have ever written about the Curiosities Column in "Fantasy and Science Fiction" magazine. If you are not familiar with "Fantasy and Science Fiction", you should take a look next time you are at a magazine stand. The magazine has a long held reputation for publishing new Science Fiction. They have a “Curiosities” page which is written by different people almost every issue. 

I contacted them when I was getting ready to print NEQUA. I wrote a one page overview of NEQUA, which appeared in 2013, in the July - August issue. I got some good contacts out of that article.

Since I am now getting ready to reprint “The Moon is Inhabited” by “Columba” who was born Annabell Krebs, and married a Culverwell. I contacted "Fantasy and Science Fiction" again and they said it was O.K to submit a Curiosities Column on “Columba” and her writing. I just received notification that the page on Columba will appear in the 2017 May –June issue.   

It was really an up hill battle to reconstruct Annabell’s life. To start I only had the name “Columba” which appeared on the front cover of her book "The Moon is Inhabited". There wasn't any information in the book, so finding information on her was the proverbal needle in the haystack. With Columba I was not sure what haystack to start looking in and for awhile I didn’t know if there even was a Columba needle to find.  Maybe it was just a big prank. I tried author lists, science fiction lists, and the National Archives. I tried “Chronicling America, the National Endowment for the Humanities website, which has digitized thousands of newspapers. There was nothing on “Columba”.

One day I was trying to find prices for some art work that my wife owns. As a fluke I typed in Columba and three drawings came up which were attributed to “Columba" Krebs. There was a very close resemblance between the people in the drawings and the illustrations, which are found in my copy of “The Moon is Inhabited”. The name Krebs led to Culverwell, her married name and the National Archives listed an Annabell Krebs Culverwell. It was all down hill from there. Four months had passed since I first started looking for Columba. 

May the NEW YEAR bring you something NEW! 

May the NEW YEAR find you Healthy and Happy!

May you have NO trouble dropping the negative thoughts, 

feelings and ideas from the past!         I'm trying. 

Started working on my income tax so I can take the stuff to the accountant in a few weeks.The reality of a second year of book sales as reflected in dollars and cents stared accusingly up at me from the final totals. It became the cause of some reflection, it has not been a successful year. I am still working on “my platform” which reminds me that I need to buy another issue of Writers Digest to find out what to try next.

Book sales have been real interesting.  I tend to imagine who and why might be interested in reading the message in NEQUA.  The tax figures show I am about 99% wrong in my assumptions.

I’ve placed notes on a bunch of Facebook pages of organizations that I have joined. Most of them are groups with an interest in politics , Science Fiction or books.

I’ve sent review copies to feminist publications, science fiction magazines, and several miscellaneous magazines.  This endeavor has been a complete failure.

I personally contacted the public libraries in the Kansas city area. Mid-continent Library system was very precise. It costs to much to accept a self published book and they are not interested in being an archive for books with a historical background.

Kansas City Public Library took a copy for their archives.

I emailed a list of professors and libraries at academic institutions that have departments with specific emphasis in feminism, mid-west American history, political history, or science fiction as literature.  I’ve had some sales generated from this list which requires constant upgrading and additions. The copies seem to find their way to archives in the individual institutions.

I sent emails to a list of Kansas Public Libraries and public education institutions, which provided some very sporadic sales. 

The questions from buyers are  very revealing.  "Is this a YA book? Young Adult? Is it part of a series? Is it real science fiction?" "When you say,  “It presents a social system” do you mean like Socialism or Commu...IS this a subversive book?" "No, It is a book of imagination and IDEAS."    IDEAS ??

The look on one face reminded me of Cheech and Chong   "IDEAS?" “We don’t need NO stinking IDEAS.”

Over all there seems to be NO readership. Instead of being treated like a book, NEQUA is treated as an anomaly, not as a book to read. Well that is not  really a surprise. With NO sex, and NO violence why would anyone of today be interested. 

So with all that depressing information I must say that I am still glad I found NEQUA or it found me. I especially have enjoyed learning HOW to get something into print. The lack of success has not slowed me up from my next project which was written and illustrated by a woman named COLUMBA.

This last week I tried A. O. Grigsby again and acquired two small news articles of his giving presentations at The First Society of Spirtualists.

So now I’m looking into the historical material on Spiritualists. It just happens that I know several people who attend spiritualist meetings so I emailed a couple of them. I also know about The Sunset Spiritualist Camp that happens every summer at the Spiritualist Camp in Wells Kansas. Since that location is one of the oldest in Kansas I am hoping that some additional material may show up through those sources.

Incidentally, they will start their 2016 summer camp on June 2.

Topeka must have been a real interesting place in 1900. What happened to the progeny of the people who lived in Topeka in 1900? I would like to talk to a few of those whose relatives were involved in Spiritualism, Christian Socialism, or Social Justice causes. Those who could answer some questions about the times.

T

Also found a notation on a woman who was named Nequa Law and lived in Topeka. Her birth year was in 1900.

As I am very obsessive, I have been looking again for more information on the NEQUA people. I found two more tidbits, two more leads on information that provide more questions than answers. Every couple of months or so I go back to the internet looking for new information on the NEQUA people, It seems that the internet will keep looking for additional material as long as there are requests being entered into the search engines.

A later news item also refers to the son working in the capitol. There is a question about his mother’s last name being the same as the auditors and a suspicion exists that there is some family favoritism. The auditor admits that Mrs. Lowe was from the same area he was from in Kentucky, Walter works for November and December of 1893 and January through June in 1894,

The Humanities Newspaper Project keeps digitizing newspapers, which means that more minute material shows up every time I recheck it. I have about a dozen subjects I use for searching every once in a while. Slowly but surely a clearer picture of the Lowes emerges.

The other day I talked with a couple of people who have actually read their copy of NEQUA. It was interesting to get their take on the book.

One person mentioned that he had enjoyed the inclusion of political ideas in NEQUA and that he had always wondered how Kim Stanley Robinson ever convinced himself that political commentary could be hidden in between the lines of his Science Fiction. I commented that he didn’t seem to hide ideas he just revealed them slowly and with sardonic humor. The Years of Rice and Salt instantly came to mind. It was political, but I took it in, as commentary of a spiritual nature. 

I remembered that when I first read The Years of Rice and Salt, I had just come across the idea that we usually view time on a vertical axis rather than on a horizontal plane. We should try thinking about time as a horizontal plane of events, a chronology of "events" that seem to have taken place along side each other. The horizontal idea coupled with a little reincarnation, allowed that we are born into a period just to the right of last time, IF, WE PROCEEDED correctly through last times lessons. 

IF WE HAD FAILED we were reborn to the left of where we had been and took enough of our personality along that there was always a nagging, déjà vu, feeling just behind almost every big decision we made. We lived almost all of the same life over again. It would explain several events in my present life.

"Do you really know?" Yes, I know, I know that this feeling is not just the results of spicy chili or too much wine. I’ve had the feeling, when stone cold sober. A feeling that “last time I really screwed up big time and at this same exact point in my life” It was accompanied  with, whole blood chilling sentences, that reverberated in my head, “No No don’t mess this up again” followed by a calmness, when the new decision was being encompassed and acted out like an actor on the stage.

 I would say that the writing in “The Years of Rice and Salt” indicates that Robinson has also had that same terror.

There are also the statements or a poetic turn of a phrase, that seems to speak specifically to my heart from time to time which seem to me to also be reminders, not just soulful, rather a soul full and spilling over moment.

Such is the line in “Amazing Grace”  -----“which saved a wretch like” or when Ira Tucker steps into “Love Me Like A Rock” with Little Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon.

Don’t ask me why but hearing Fred Sanford (Red Foxx), while courting a lady on Sanford and Sons say, “Nothing like two free birds getting together over a bottle of Ripple” provides some of the same type of heartfelt feeling.

A review of NEQUA found in Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction is now circulating. It is quite well done. Foundations is published in England.  Here are two quotes from the review.

“Mark Esping, who serendipitously came across a copy on a bookshelf and not hidden away in an archive, has meticulously researched the few clues that remain as to the authorship and inspiration for Nequa”

“.Nequa mediates between the dual American desires for an economically robust nation within a pastoral setting: ‘Not withstanding all the evidences of a highly cultivated country and the most active traffic and trade between the different sections, we nowhere discovered any indications of great cities… nowhere did we see vast clouds of smoke such as vitiate the atmosphere in the large cities and manufacturing districts of the outer world’ (p. 118).”

I also contacted The Midwest Book Review, which provided a pleasant surprise.  I dialed the phone number and a man answered the phone. It was Mr. Cox himself. He was not only pleasant but extremely informative.  I followed his advice and a review of NEQUA appears in the October on-line issue of Small Press Bookwatch. Take a look at http://www.midwestbookreview.com/sbw/oct_15.htm#Fantasy/SciFi

If anyone knows of some other places I should contact for reviews or places to place reviews please send me an email. 

Send an email to your entire email list telling them to buy NEQUA at Amazon.com or from KC Metro Books, listed on biblio.com.

The reprinting of NEQUA has been a real learning situation for me.  Since it is a reprint it does not fit the requirements of a lot of reviewers. Reviews are the way to reach those persons, most interested in a specific type of book. 

Finding the people who will get a review into a publication where it will be read by the segment of the public I have in mind is doubly hard. I want NEQUA to find it’s way into the academic and public libraries.

Why,       ------because I have developed certain suppositions about the motives behind the writing and printing by the original copyright holders.  I feel that the ideas they exposed are still very valid and thus need to be available for readers in a form other than microfilm.  The setting of the story and method of introducing the ideas allows for a person with an avowed dislike of SOCIALISM and SOCIALIST ideas to perhaps read the book without shutting their mind, as many of us are trained to do in college classes, which investigate social and economic systems other than democracy and capitalism.

I am also positive that there are quasi-religious ideas available for a reader of NEQUA that were written into the book. Ideas which lay dormant because they are not part of the main stream of American life.  Some ideas which my eyes and intellect could perceive, but many more that a lack of background and experience on my part is kept hidden from my intellect.  “Hints” that due to societal changes or a lack of guided suggestion, would be read by me, with no ability to cross reference since the origins of  some material or methods of explaining them has changed drastically since the book was originally printed. In other words the common everyday “knowledge of events” which the average man would carry in a  life time in the 1900’s, was very different than my view looking backward from 2015. Only by deconstructing the book with a look out for catch phrases or cliches from 1900 could one actually see the origins of  the book and the intent of the authors.

I found the “mother-love” concept by accident. The names and descriptions of the characters and place names which appear in NEQUA are also not happenstance.

My conclusions as described were partially born out in  statements which appear in a review written by Michelle Yost. She finds several notations which she feels are derived from Mary Baker Eddy and her belief system. I have read some Christian Science material but I missed the references she found. Her review appears in the current issue of  Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction which is published in Liverpool, England.