This book cover lies! Some guy at the Los Angeles Times called this book "A superb thriller... tantalizing," but I don't think he read the book.
Because Seicho Matsumoto's Inspector Imanishi Investigates, a.k.a. Suna no Utsuwa, a.k.a. Vessel of Sand as the book was called in Japan, is not a thriller. It's a police procedural and a very good mystery, but its pace is far too slow and it spends far too much time on cold leads and dead ends to be a thriller.
Finally got a chance to read the third book in this Aliens omnibus: The Female War, by Steve Perry and Stephani Perry. Every time I read one of these, I learn something new, and this time it was that these books--all three of them--were novelizations of comic books, and not the other way around, as I thought when I reviewed the first two.
Anyway, this book continues the story of Billie and Wilks, with surprise ending guest from the previous book, Ripley! People are having a new kind of dream about the aliens on Gateway station, and this book is about figuring out what the dreams mean and what can be done about them.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This one was a lot of fun! I borrowed a P.G. Wodehouse book from a colleague of mine ten or so years ago and really enjoyed it, but I never went back to the author... until this week! A friend of mine introduced me to the "Jeeves and Wooster" TV show as well as "Blandings," and I thought, why not read a little Wodehouse and see what I think?
Well, I picked up a big Wodehouse collection on Amazon, something like 4000 pages, and it turns out it only contains one of the like 15 Jeeves books and a collection of Jeeves short stories. Something about the licensing of Wodehouse's work puts his stuff all over the place.
Oh, well.
The book I read for this review is Right Ho, Jeeves, which is apparently the second Jeeves novel. This one was released in 1934, which is the same year the first Nero Wolfe book was published. Odd coincidence, but auspicious.
