Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.
Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”
The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly; The Haunted Castle; Bleeding Earth, The Book of Ruth, The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith (all reviewed earlier); The Old Burrill House (reviewed in my science blog (url); The Gentleman (not reviewed in my blogs); Ursa Minor (reviewed here); and You Little Demon (reviewed in the last essay in this series).
In Ursa Minor, Rice explores friendship vs. sexual love. The unnamed main character is helplessly dependent on the sexuality of his girlfriend, who acts as if she does not need him. Then he meets Ursa Minor, an old man, who is far less fortunate in love and life than he is, but seems to accept it. To the main character, Ursa is like a teddy bear (which is what ursa minor means), but then realizes that he himself is a teddy bear for the woman he adores. When she becomes terminally ill, they both realize that the teddy-bear kind of love, humble friendship, is more important than sex.
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