The Marching Morons (Annotated)

📖 The Scoop

Some things had not changed. A potter's wheel was still a potter's wheel and clay was still clay. Efim Hawkins had built his shop near Goose Lake, which had a narrow band of good fat clay and a narrow beach of white sand. He fired three bottle-nosed kilns with willow charcoal from the wood lot. The wood lot was also useful for long walks while the kilns were cooling; if he let himself stay within sight of them, he would open them prematurely, impatient to see how some new shape or glaze had come through the fire, and--ping!--the new shape or glaze would be good for nothing but the shard pile back of his slip tanks.
A business conference was in full swing in his shop, a modest cube of brick, tile-roofed, as the Chicago-Los Angeles "rocket" thundered overhead--very noisy, very swept-back, very fiery jets, shaped as sleekly swift-looking as an airborne barracuda.

Genre: Fiction / Action & Adventure (fancy, right?)