The Critics Lied! Stevenson's "New Arabian Nights" Is Way Different from Machen's "Three Impostors!"

When I did my reading and review of Arthur Machen's Three Impostors a while back, I kept finding critics who said it was too like Robert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights. Well, now I've read the first volume of New Arabian Nights, and I think the critics were really digging when they came up with that one. I'll explain why in a minute.

Smashing Good Comedy with a Big Surprise! Reviewing "My Man Jeeves"

Well, I had a feeling that I wanted to read something a bit more light and fun this week, so I decided to take a look at My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. I've covered Right Ho, Jeeves in the past after I bought a giant Wodehouse collection, and I was surprised to discover that Right Ho is actually the sixth book in the series!

My Man Jeeves is the first book, published in 1919, and collecting stories published from 1911 through 1917, and that's the source of a big surprise, at least for me!

A Strange Coincidence, Three Years Before "The King in Yellow..."

Thanks to the YouTube channel Liminal Spaces for finding this incredible book! His video "Insane Mind-Bending Weird Fiction that Came Out 3 Years Before The King in Yellow" pointed me in the direction of this collection of short stories by Marcel Schwob.

Interestingly, the English translation, by Iain White from 1982, collects stories from four of Schwob's books, but omits many of them! In this post, I'm only considering stories from Schwob's Double Hearts and The King in the Golden Mask, and White actually translated less than half of them!

A Fascinating True Crime Story Born from Obsession!

My first time trying to review a true crime book, let's see how this goes...

Zodiac is a 1986 book by Robert Graysmith, an artist and cartoonist who was a youngster working with the San Francisco Chronicle back in the 1960s when the whole Zodiac murder thing happened. He wasn't part of the Chronicle's investigative team. He got obsessed with the case, and this is the partial story of his investigation into what we know and what he thinks he knows.

Graysmith wasn't just reading reports, either; he got personally involved with interviewing suspects, victims, and law enforcement. He has a number of his own theories.

A Damn Good King Arthur Story... Review of Bernard Cornwell's "The Winter King"

This one was a doozy, but a good doozy. The Winter King is the first book in a trilogy that Bernard Cornwell calls "The Warlord Chronicles." It's a retelling of the King Arthur legend, but with extra attention paid to incorporating the scraps of historical data we have from back then, as well as a dark, gritty, and earthy interpretation that refuses to whitewash the characters or the setting.

It was a really, really good book.

Doc Smith's Last Book Is Familiar but Different... Skylark Duquesne Review!

I'm finally getting around to finishing the Skylark series! Even though Skylark of Valeron had a pretty definitive ending back in 1934, apparently lots of readers, including Frederik Pohl, wanted more Skylark, and in 1965, Doc Smith agreed. He serialized the new book, Skylark DuQuesne, in IF Worlds of Science Fiction and collected into a book in 1966.

It was Smith's last book before he passed away.

Like a lot of Smith's stuff, the book starts with a crazy revelation--the method Seaton and company used to keep DuQuesne and the bodiless intelligences out of trouble turns out to have a fatal flaw, and probably won't last very long. This kind of reframing or even retconning is a pretty common element in Smith's sequels, so it wasn't too jarring. In fact, the reason given and the logic behind it is subtle but surprisingly sound.

Fascinating Arguments and Literary Sand Bags: A Review of "A Canticle for Leibowitz"

I felt like I had been neglecting science fiction, so I went hunting around last weekend. There's a book of some of the early Hugo-winning short fiction, and first up there was The Darfsteller, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. Well, I went looking for alternate copies of that novella and everywhere I looked the covers recommended Miller's classic novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz. Sometimes loudly. I figured I'd check it out.

I've heard of it but I had never read it until a few days ago!

What I found was a very solid book, with excellent worldbuilding, and with very good tone, characters, ideas, and perspectives. But the "very good" elements each fell slightly short of excellence for a specific reason, but more on that below.