- half-breeds on venus: this appears to have been a commissioned piece, and it picks up the plotline of the first part without any kind of interesting undertones. audience-pandering for-profit throwaway.

- homo sol: federation entrance. besides being disparaging towards humans in an empty manner, the plot has no apparent purpose. this one is throwaway.

- the secret sense: i've actually wondered quite a bit in this space about the possibility of magnetism as a sixth sense, and don't remember what sparked it. i vaguely recall reading some genetic studies pointing out that humans (and most other mammals) have the dna to understand magnetism, as our ancestors had it, back when we were fish. we have a few organs that don't seem to have an entirely clear purpose, and it's worth wondering if they might be vestigial. so, it's actually not as insane as you might think to hypothesize that we could bring this back out of our genome, although i suspect that trying to navigate a reality full of cell phone signals and wireless internet would be pretty painful. i'm not particularly interested in the underlying discourse about relativity in art, but he seems to be predicting the way in which a class of retards used lsd in the 60s, down to the flashbacks.