The Skin-Crawling Island of Dr. Moreau!

I was going through some Amazing Stories and found out that they reprinted H.G.Wells's classic The Island of Dr. Moreau. I had never read it before, so I thought I'd give it a try!

The book was originally published in 1896, and there's a famous 1996 film that I never saw, but I did hear a bit about. Still, I knew little enough that the story was a bit of a surprise.

It combines a shipwreck story--a popular form back in the day--with dark, biological science fiction. It's written from the point of view of Edward Prendick, an English natural historian.

A Leap at Literary Chaos; A Look at some Harlan Ellison (Part 1?)

I recently picked up a collection of Harlan Ellison stories--it's called "Greatest Hits" but you know what that means: it's stories people other than Ellison think are "important," rather than necessarily "good."

I've never read much Ellison up until now. I read "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" once after watching the Retsupurae of the game.

Starting with the illiterate NPR headline and the (I imagine he rolled in his grave when they added the un-Ellisonly) warning about "outdated cultural representations and language," I was a little wary, but kept moving forward.

An Old Cultural Phenomenon: The Prisoner of Zenda Review!

I was writing an essay and I needed a name for a fictional European country. If you've seen my videos, you'll be familiar with the "Read Mises" poster in the background, and I thought of his "Ruritania" that he used for some of his examples.

But I was struck with a thought: Surely, Mises had the creativity to come up with a fictional country name, but did he? After a little digging, I found that the name Ruritania dates back to this adventure novel from 1894, by Anthony Hope. This book was so popular that it spawned a slew of imitators, satirists, and parodies, but the name "Ruritania" also got used in scholarly writings, too!

Reading: Mr. Fosdick Invents the Seidlitzmobile

Got a reading of a short, funny story from 1912, reprinted in the first year of Weird Tales! It's called "Mr. Fosdick Invents the 'Seidlitzmobile,'" and it tells the tale of an inventor's attempt to use a precursor to good ol' Alka-Seltzer as motive force for a car!

Fun, But Shallower: Nightmare Asylum, an Aliens Novel Review

Nightmare Asylum is the second novel in this Aliens Omnibus I got. Like Earth Hive, it was written by Steve Perry, and released in 1993, after the movie Alien 3. It is a direct continuation of the story of Earth Hive.

Not Merely a Proto-Conan: The Strange and Fascinating Stories of Kull!

This week I sat down with a collection of Kull stories by Robert E. Howard called Kull: Exile of Atlantis. I read and reviewed The Shadow Kingdom a while back, and I thought it might be fun to go through a bit more Kull and see what I thought.

Reviewing the "Controversial" Classic! Starship Troopers!

It's such a shame the Starship Troopers movie came out when it did, because I saw that and dismissed the book for way too long. Finally, I picked up a copy around ten years ago and damn if the book isn't a whole different animal.

In other words, this isn't my first reading.