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.

Lovecraft at Age Six! The Little Glass Bottle

I know I said I was caught up with my YouTube posts, but I was looking through my notes and I did miss a couple, so I'll try putting up those posts around one a week until I finish them.

This one is my reading and reaction to what might be the earliest example of Lovecraft's fiction: a tiny little short story (we would call it "flash fiction" today) that he wrote at the age of six!

Reading a Surprise Weird Tale: People vs. Bland, by Theodore Snow Wood

Flipping through Weird Tales, I found this story with a disarmingly simple style and a very solid pace. There are a lot of stories in WT that really don't seem to belong there, but this one surprised me with a neat little twist that I thought was handled subtly enough that I didn't see it coming on my first read. 

You'll probably catch it because I warned you, but it was a good story nonetheless.

So, I decided to do a reading of it, since it was pretty short. Enjoy!

Oh, by the way, I didn't try to do "voices" for this one but I probably should have. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess. Maybe next time.

If you'd rather read it at your own pace, you can do so on Internet Archive or Wikisource.

Whimsical, Wooly, and Weird: Charles Fort's Book of the Damned!

This book was not what I was expecting. Seeing it referred to in so many works of fiction, I expected it to be fiction or fictionalized accounts of foggy real events. In actuality, it contains hundreds and hundreds of references to real reports in journals and magazines, and Fort's attempt to offer alternative explanations for them in a somewhat unserious way.

A Book Full of Feist's Fortes: Krondor: The Assassins

Krondor: The Assassins is the second book in the Riftwar Legacy saga. It's a story connecting the two video game stories that Feist novelized after the fact: Krondor: The Betrayal is Feist's take on the story of the game Betrayal at Krondor, and it turns out (I just looked this up the other day) that Tear of the Gods is Feist's novelization of the story in Return to Krondor, which got a lot less hype than the first game back in the day.

Missed Opportunity: "Penelope" by Vincent Starrett

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Right after "The Floor Above," which I did a reading of last week, appears a short story by Vincent Starrett called "Penelope." It has tons of great elements of a good weird tale:

• A talkative, eccentric, intelligent main character: Raymond is unorthodox but imaginative and expansive in his descriptions of the world around him
• A strange astrological prophecy: Raymond is told by his mad father to "Beware of Penelope when in perihelion"
• A furtively-told story: Raymond invites Haswell into his home to tell him the story that has convinced others Raymond himself is mad
• A bizarre physical phenomenon: Raymond awakes at midnight one night to discover the force of gravity has inverted for him and only him!
• A tense twenty minutes: Raymond walking around on the ceiling draws out his landlord with a revolver
• An acrobatic exit: Raymond climbs "up" the fire escape to the street and goes around outside for a bit

Almost-Lost Wolfe Media: 1959 TV Pilot with SHATNER as Archie?!

Stumbled onto this while I was poking around on the Internet Archive. Apparently CBS produced a few episodes of a Nero Wolfe TV series back in 1959, with Kurt Kasznar as Wolfe and William Shatner as Archie. The pilot survives in a remastered and colorized version here.