conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is a description for a book titled Case and the Dreamer about Case, Dreamer, Brothers with the genre: Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: This is the book club (and only hardcover) edition. Three novellas, including: Case and the Dreamer (1973); If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister? (1967); When You Care, When You Love (1962).
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Case and the Dreamer
  And on two occasions the sensitive airfoils of a winghouse were not up to the insane swirling of the Medean winds and the structure was damaged. Twice—in a century. He saw the ground cycles of the Terran expeditions arrive, and the Terrans exploring, testing, and trying desperately to communicate with the passive Arcans, and failing two years ago as they had failed repeatedly in the previous ninety. He saw the translators offered, refused (ignored is a better word) piled up and, on successive later viewings, gradually scattered and lost. And Altair's comment that nothing ever happens in Arca turned out to be only too true. The main hall and its power had changed virtually not at all since the first recordings. Outbuildings came and went, but not much. A dozen or a score of Arcans would file out once in a while, and could be seen trudging away into the mountains until the "thick light" obscured them. A dozen or a score would file out of the mountains and into the hall—whether or not they were the same ones there was no way of knowing. There was no noticeable sex differentiation and there were no young. "There is no need," Aquare explained. (Explained?)
  And Aquare performed the bubbly squeak which emerged from his translator as "Yes." Dom Felix, totally prepared and tensed for a long campaign of trial and error, regrouping and flanking, almost physically stumbled, like a man running up seven steps when the architect had put only six in the flight. Ask him what it was he fell over.
  Altair (after having said the inevitable "what the hell for?") told him he would have to start Aquare out first and drive out a couple of terradays later, because no Arcan had ever agreed to ride on a cycle, and the only alternative would be to hoof it with Aquare, which no human in his right mind would attempt, not on Medea. Aquare, who was present at this interchange, mumbled and squeaked and his translator said, "I ride," and it was Altair's turned to fall over the step that wasn't there.
  The cycle—and it was a new one, equipped with a stable platform Kert Row had designed—required very little instruction. The route to Arca had been scanned many times before, and was not only visible depicted on a large screen, but was compared with the scanned reality as it traveled, so that any change—a boulder on the path, for example, or an animal over a certain size, or an Arcan pedestrian, would be noticed, alerted, and avoided instantly and automatically. There was no speed control as such, but a simple GO and STOP lever and on-off OPTIMUM button. With this in the on position, speed was a safe balance between performance and terrain. There were manual overrides for both speed and steering, but it would be hard to imagine a situation in which they would be useful.
  The machine was in constant communication with the enclave, not only with the ever-ready voice transmitter, which, though it could be turned off, would turn itself on again in even the slightest emergency, but with a locator signal which had no override. It was powered by a battery that, for surface travel, was virtually inexhaustible and that could leap the machine for several days before it required recharging sufficiently to leap again. The leaps, ten to twenty meters at a time, were undertaken only when the vehicle's computers decided they were safe with all variables scanned: speed, slope, planned course, obstacles, and especially the wind. The strange, surging gait of this machine had become traditional in the enclave, even working its way into some love poetry; it (the gait, not the poetry) was exhilarating to some Terrans, soothing to others, and absolutely nauseating to a few. Kert Row's refinement had lessened all these phenomena. It had yet to work its way into literature.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is five more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A clothing manufacturer in downtown Los Angeles began production of filmy ladies' T-shirts emblazoned with the words: I'VE HAD IT.
  Breaking the news in this way was a stroke of genius. The ink was still wet on the first printing when Dr. McCambridge's phone rang. It was an attorney suggesting himself as Dr. McCambridge's counsel in a lawsuit against the paper for malicious defamation. McCambridge suggested that the attorney go back to chasing ambulances; he was out of his league. And after that no one called Dr. McCambridge on the subject of the epidemic for three days. The news was soaking up from below; so many believed nothing that 'scandal sheet' ever printed that the truth came to them gradually. By the time the wire services began to be aware of the story, by the time city editors got around to sending out reporters, by the time broadcast news directors got their writers banging out their scripts on the big-type typewriters, more than half the population knew.
  After the three days, of course, it was trickle to flood to deluge. McCambridge gave interviews to the top three newsmagazines, two wire services, three women's magazines, and the raunchiest pornography monthly on the market (on the grounds the porn mag would reach all the readers the other magazines did not). Thereafter he dictated a cassette (which he rephrased every forty-eight hours, calling each an 'update'), left standing orders not to be disturbed by anyone, particularly doctors and politicians, and hid in his lab, ostensibly in search of a cure—which was a lie.
  It was pretty wild at first: a rush to the churches and temples, sometimes by the most improbable people; a flood tide of aggression against persons, against nations, quelled almost immediately by a larger tide of sobriety, reflection, self-examination. Acquisition—of goods, companies, funds—went to unheard-of peaks and then plunged as more and more people began to wonder if it were really useful to own such a lot for such a little. Regrettably, there were some suicides, but the overall suicide rate began to decline; why accelerate the inevitable?
  McCambridge called Szigeti in. The young reporter was sallow, drawn; if he continued to carry whatever it was that burdened him, he would not be called 'young' very much longer.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last paragraph?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: From 1976 to 1985, after a brief period of living in San Diego, Jayne and Ted shuttled regularly between Los Angeles (where his son Andros lived) and Springfield, Oregon. Diagnosed in 1976 as suffering from idiopathic diffuse interstitial fibrosis of the lungs, by 1984, Sturgeon found it harder and harder to breathe and engage in regular activities. In January of 1985, he went alone to Maui to try an alternative healing regimen. When it was apparent that the regimen was failing, he returned to Springfield, very ill. He died in the hospital in Eugene on May 8, 1985. Present were Jayne; two family friends, Charles Holloway and Rennie Cantine; six of his seven children (Patricia, Robin, Tandy, Noël, Timothy, and Andros); and his third wife, Marion. He was 67. With a strange prescience, one of his most famous and beloved stories, "The Man Who Lost the Sea" (Volume 10), contains a detailed description of how it feels to die from lack of air.