On a cold day in New York City, around 1989, outside a Chinese restaurant that had a large sculpture of a chopsticks hanging from the ceiling, my brother was looking at a new sci-fi book he just bought at a bookstore called "Limbo System" by Rick Cook. The cover had aliens that looked like dinosaur-like reptiles in spacesuits holding ray-guns as they were about to ambush someone on a spaceship. I never read the book, but for years afterwards, I had a completely irrational fear that everyone I met was secretly one of these creatures, wearing a human mask. And that if I caught them by surprise, perhaps by peering though cracked door, I could see their true reptilian heads.
|