Two Very Different Halves: Second Foundation Review!

This was the most ambivalent the Foundation series ever made me. Second Foundation is the third book in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, and it was the last one for nearly thirty years. This book was serialized in 1948 and 1949, and novelized in 1953. The next book didn't come until 1982. So this was the conclusion of Asimov's vision until publishers begged him for more.

A Classic Japanese Space Opera! Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 1

This book is a pretty serious classic of Japanese space opera. Written by Yoshiki Tanaka in 1982 (I think), it spawned a series of 10 main books and 5 volumes of side stories. It was adapted into anime twice, and manga, and video games. But it didn't really make it over to the U.S. in any official capacity until around 2016.

Fun, Satirical Comedy: Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

This one was a lot of fun! I borrowed a P.G. Wodehouse book from a colleague of mine ten or so years ago and really enjoyed it, but I never went back to the author... until this week! A friend of mine introduced me to the "Jeeves and Wooster" TV show as well as "Blandings," and I thought, why not read a little Wodehouse and see what I think?

Well, I picked up a big Wodehouse collection on Amazon, something like 4000 pages, and it turns out it only contains one of the like 15 Jeeves books and a collection of Jeeves short stories. Something about the licensing of Wodehouse's work puts his stuff all over the place.

Oh, well.

The book I read for this review is Right Ho, Jeeves, which is apparently the second Jeeves novel. This one was released in 1934, which is the same year the first Nero Wolfe book was published. Odd coincidence, but auspicious.

Reading: The Cask of Amontillado

Another video I forgot to post here on the blog. I read Walter Scott Story's fan-fiction "The Sequel" aloud a while back, and I posted that, but forgot to post my reading of this Poe classic.

Anyway, enjoy!

Suprisingly Good "In Universe" Fiction: Earth Hive (Aliens)

I don't read too many of these, but my friend Justin (author of The Good Guy and more, and also my co-host on The Wordy Pair) gave me this Aliens omnibus, with three novels in there.

The first one, Earth Hive (which I keep remembering wrongly as Hive Earth) was surprisingly good.

An Excellent Tragic Story from the Pages of Weird Tales!

This week I've got a strong recommendation for a short story. Filling about nine pages of the (admittedly dense) Weird Tales, "The Two Men Who Murdered Each Other" is not a creepy story, but a strange tragedy!

Written by Valma Clark and published in the July/August 1923 issue of WT, it's excellently written, with a gentle but consistent flow and a timeless style. The prose is detailed without being overly flowery or wordy, and the three characters are developed quite well considering the limited space.

The Last Lensman Book: Reviewing The Vortex Blaster

This book was attached to the end of the Lensman Super Pack I bought a long time ago, but after I read through all of the main books, I looked at this one and it seemed like it was mostly unrelated to the Lensman series, at least in the first few pages that I read. So, I neglected it for a while.

Last weekend, I decided to give it a look, and I quite liked what I found. This book is a novel created by stitching together three of Doc Smith's stories about a guy named Neal Cloud. It has also been called Masters of the Vortex, but the version I read was called The Vortex Blaster. There might be some small differences between versions.