Horrifying, Fascinating, Excellent: Monster by Naoki Urasawa

This manga series was adapted into an excellent anime in 2004--that's where I first learned of it.

The anime was never licensed here in America, but the manga was. The manga is hauntingly good.

It's a complex story spanning something like 4000 manga pages, with lots of different themes and motifs. At its base, it's the quest of a doctor to right the wrong his own righteousness created. It's full of mystery, the shadows of tyrannical dead governments, life on the run, and questions of morality and philosophy. There are segments of high tension and dread, and equally well-handled scenes of explosive action.

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the illiterate NPR headline and the (I imagine he rolled in his grave when they added the un-Ellisonly) warning about "outdated cultural representations and language," I was a little wary, but kept moving forward.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