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.

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.