31 Saturday Dec 2011
Posted in Personal
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 59,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 22 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
31 Saturday Dec 2011
Posted in Books
233: MY: All I Did Was Shoot My Man – Walter Mosley
234: MY: Time To Create And Murder – Lawrence Block
235: TC: A Murder Before Eden – Alison Pratt
236: WE: Miles To Little Ridge(ebook) – Heath Lowrance
237: TH: The Dummy Line – Bobby Cole
238: WE: Assault of The Mountain Man – William W. Johnstone with J. A. Johnstone
239: AD: Fight Card: Split Decision(ebook) – Jack Tunney
240: SF: Deep Sky – Patrick Lee
241: WE: The Sharpshooter – Ed Gorman
242: Sf: Tales From The Fathomless Abyss(ebook) – edited by Philip Athlan. stories by Mike Resnick, Jay Lake, Cat Rambo, Mel Odom, J. M. McDermitt, Brad Torgerson, and Philip Athlan
243: SP: Tama of The Light Country – Ray Cummings
244: SP Tama, Princess of Mercury – Ray Cummings
245: SF: Blind Traveler’s Blues(ebook) – Robert P. Bennett
246: HR: The Dead Walked: Outbreak(ebook) – Vincent Stark(Gary M. Dobbs)
247: HR: The Dead Man: The Beast Within(ebook) – James Daniels
248: SF: Empire of The Gods(ebook) – David Stag
249: SF: Empire State – Adam Christopher
250: SP: A Princess of Mars – Edgar Rice Burroughs
251: HM: One Horse Open Slay(ebook) – James Mullaney
252: SF: Run, Come See Jerusalem! – Richard C. Meredith
253: MY: Stranglehold – Ed Gorman
254: SF: The Time Tunnel: Timeslip! – Murray Leinster
255: ME: Days of Beer: A memoir of a Beer Drinkin’ Man(ebook) – Charles Gramlich
The best year I’ve had in a few, the second highest total since I’ve been keeping records, in numbers anyway. The chief reason is the rise of ebooks. There’s some good stuff out there, not available in any other format, and they generally run shorter than paper books.
I’m on Goodreads and joined a reading pledge for 2011. I promised 240 books and passed that quite easily. I thought I did well until I looked at some of the other participants. One fellow pledged 365 books and the last time I checked was on 387. He admits a lot of them are graphic novels. Still impressive though.
31 Saturday Dec 2011
Posted in movies
A Page of Madness(1926)
Davy Crockett, Indian Scout(1950)
Two Flags West(1950)
The Last Musketeer(1952)
The Brain Eaters(1958)
30 Friday Dec 2011
Posted in ebook
re
The aliens came and left Earth’s civilization in ruins. Their technology completely overwhelmed us and then they simply loaded billions of people aboard their ships and left. No one knew why they wanted those billions.
Now they had returned.
It was seventy-five years later and civilization had been slow to recover. Mostly farming communities with moderate technology, one small such village was taken and loaded aboard ship.
One of the prisoners was a young man named Linus. During the loading process, some of the people rioted and he was shoved into a compartment away from his fellow citizens.
There he made friends and learned the truth. This group were pirates, scavengers that followed behind the monstrous government raids and picked over the leavings. People, slaves, were simply currency by Primus Reggia, the powerful federation that controlled most of the galaxy.
The trip was long, lots of people died, others bullied those they could, the ship was attacked and crash landed on a planet. Linus has a bit of luck and survives, managing to befriend one of the new pirates, the Rat Bastards,joining them.
So begins his odyssey. He moves up in rank, his computer skills coming in handy. After the mission, he lives on the home planet with one family until riots break out.
Back to pirating with another outfit.
On an attack on a freighter, he meets a young woman terrified and helps her. he was never comfortable with the pirate life and they way the whole civilization lived.
His rise to positions of power, his decency, what he wants to do about it, highlight this fine first novel.
I quite enjoyed this one. The author puts forth a convincing enough explanation of why most of the universe is populated with humans, good enough for me to suspend my disbelief and enjoy the book(hey, I never questioned why every alien was humanoid in Star Trek. I just loved it).
The author uses science fiction settings to reflect his views of our world, especially people’s fascination with that most unholy, reality TV, people famous for nothing more than being famous, and performance enhancing drugs prevalent in sports today. All of it in one gory incident.
I agreed with his views.
The book is available on Amazon in both paperback and for the Kindle.
29 Thursday Dec 2011
Posted in Books
I mentioned in my review of A RIP THROUGH TIME that this was one of my favorite time travel themed novels, so I decided to haul it out for a reread and post. Published in 1976, the cover art was by the brothers Hildebrandt. The other edition I have is the English edition from 1985.
It’s 2032 and the country is in control of the World Ecumenical Church, a fringe cult that grew, taking a few elections, expanding, getting one elected as President, then a manufactured emergency got the Constitution “temporarily” suspended until order was restored.
Order never seemed to get restored.
The President is a figurehead, the country controlled from New Jerusalem, formerly Chicago, where the founder, “The Anointed One,” grew up. Threats of nuclear war and biologics had allowed Mexico and Canada to be annexed.
The Proctors were the secret police, the Lay Brothers of St. Wilson the enforcement arm. Blueshirts they were called. And hated.
Our hero, Dr. Eugene Stillman, is a scholar and a chronalnaut, one of those that use the time machine to record historical events. The Crucifixion had been recorded, as had been Martin Luther nailing his articles to the Catholic Church door. Stillman was an expert in Shakespeare and was headed back to observe the man.
There was an underground, The Cell, that wanted to overturn the WEC and restore the Constitution. Stillman didn’t like things as they were, but he was a loyal, law-abiding citizen.
Until he met a young woman named Melanie.
Beautiful and, despite her VV badge, for victorious virgin, was a hot-blooded young woman he began an affair with. She soon revealed she was a member of the Cell and
wanted his help. He wasn’t interested, but she could be persuasive. They had got hold of a copy of the Anointed One’s mother’s diary, knew the history that no one else did, and wanted him to kill the mother while she was just a few weeks into her pregnancy. They had dates and everything.
Once he arrived in Shakespeare’s time, he would have control of the chronalcage and could go where he wanted.
He was still unsure about changing time.
But when a Proctor and a band of blueshirts broke into the lab just as the countdown was started to arrest him and Melanie, he hit the emergency downtime button.
And so began his odyssey, a chase through time from prehistoric times to Chicago at various dates, and the folly of trying to change time.
The book held up on this reread after thirty-five years.
I don’t know much about how the publishing world, then or now, but these two editions, published nine years apart, seem to have been set with the same “plates(I’m not sure about the nomenclature).” They have the same number of pages, all chapters begin and end on the same page numbers, and the type is the same. That seems unusual to me. In my experience with the same book, American and British editions, is that the British has always had less pages.
I don’t know.
As on last Friday, Todd Mason is doing host duties this week.
29 Thursday Dec 2011
Posted in music
Chuck Mangione was a favorite of mine back in the early seventies. He plays the flugelhorn(we always referred to it as a pregnant trumpet). His music was a sort of jazz influenced pop music, more pop if the truth be told. I liked it, though. CHILDREN OF SANCHEZ was one particular favorite. I found a review that said there was enough pleasant music here to satisfy his fans. Count me satisfied. My knowledge is somewhat limited. I haven’t heard it in years as my copy is on vinyl and, while I still have a turntable, it’s packed away with a wrecked needle.
This post might inspire me to get the DVD available at a not unreasonable price.
And I’ve never seen the film starring Anthony Quinn as Sanchez.
For other forgotten music, check out Scott D. Parker over at his blog.
26 Monday Dec 2011
Posted in movies
It’s time for another edition of those truly awful films, so bad that one comes to appreciate them on a whole other level. One of those Roger Corman “classics” coming in at a budget of $30,000, it only ran sixty minutes and I had to agree with several IMDB reviewers that it seemed much longer. Music is credited to a Tom Jonson, but one reviewer says there is no other work in that name anywhere.
I noticed immediately that the plot seemed “borrowed” from Robert A. Heinlein’s THE PUPPET MASTERS and the master did indeed sue over the plagiarism. Corman didn’t argue, claiming unfamiliarity with Heinlein’s works and settled out of court for $5,000. Heinlein also got a guarantee of no mention ever in the credits as he found the film lacking.
Ed Nelson stars, billed as Edwin Nelson, and also serves as the producer. In money saving efforts, he wore the same jacket worn in another of his films and created the “monsters” out of wind-up toys covered with fur from a coat with pipe cleaners for mandibles. L.A. late night horror host Seymour often referred to the movie as the “attack of the bunny slippers.” They attach the mandibles to the base of the back of the neck into the spinal column.
A fifty foot high cone, with a base of fifty feet, suddenly appears in the woods outside the small town of Riverdale, Illinois. No one knows what it is or how it got there. A number of dead wildlife is found lying around it. Word and film gets to Washington and a senator is sent down to head the investigation of the UFO. Cornelius Keefe, billed as Jack Hill, plays Senator Walter K. Hill, who never mentions his name, or anyone else for that matter, without the K. Ed Nelson is Dr. Paul Ketterling who is the scientific mind of the investigation.
They spend a lot of time standing around looking at the cone, climbing the scaffolding built around it, and discussing what it might be. In that interim, the monsters are gradually taking over the town and it’s inhabitants, cutting them off from help.
They learn the things come from the bowels of the Earth, two hundred million years old, and are an advance to prepare the way for the ancient civilization to take over the surface. Ketterling finally at the end briefly meets a bearded old man in robes who’s the leader. Here’s where it gets funny. Unrecognizable, I only recognized him by his voice. Leonard Nimoy’s name is misspelled in the film credits as Nemoy.
Guns are used frequently and always seem to be pointed to the side of what they’re being aimed at, though they never seem to miss.
Hardly a gem, but one I could look at every now and again.
The Brain Eaters trailer Should anyone be inclined to watch this “gem,” here’s a link to part one, The Brain Eaters, and from there you can get to the rest.
For probably better overlooked movies, check out Todd Mason over at Sweet Freedom.
25 Sunday Dec 2011
Posted in Books
Tags
1: The Sweet and The Dead – Milton T. Burton: Burton’s new to me. I read so musch about him after his death that I felt the need to try them out. Hate that something like that made me aware of him.
2: The Rogues’ Game – Milton T. Burton
3: Nights of The Red Moon – Milton T. Burton
4: Empire State(ARC) – Adam Christopher: a PI/superhero/steampunk mix. I’m reading it now and having a good time. Comes out tomorrow(Tuesday).
5: Defending Jacob(ARC) – William Landay: assistant D.A Andy barber defends his fourteen year old son of the murder of a fellow student. The boy insists he’s innocent and as a father, he must believe him.
6: The Dead Walked: Outbreak(ebook) – Vincent Stark: Gary Dobbs of course. I read this one and liked it, not the greatest zombie fan am I.
7: The Dead Man: The Beast Within(ebook) – James Daniels: seventh book in the living dead man series. I liked this one.
8: Blind Traveler Down A Dark River(ebook) – Robert P. Bennett: the first novel to feature blind Douglas Abledan. I enjoyed the second book and picked this one up.
9: Hurt Machine(ebook) Reed Farrell Coleman: never read Coleman before and this looked interesting.
10: One Horse Open Slay(ebook) – James Mullaney: I suspect there may be a bit of humor in this one, though I could be wrong. PI Crag Banyon turns down an elf on a stolen reindeer proclaiming foul play at the North Pole and the elf turns up dead the next day. Naturally Banyon is a suspect.
24 Saturday Dec 2011
Posted in Personal
Tags
Merry Christmas to all my friends out there in the ‘net world. I hope old Saint Nick is good to you all.
22 Thursday Dec 2011
Posted in Books
Ray Cummings, 1887-1957, wrote some 750 novels and short stories in his career and is considered one of the founding fathers of pulp science fiction. He even worked with Thomas Edison for five years, 1914-19. In 1922, he wrote “Time…is what keeps everything from happening at once,” a sentence repeated by scientists over the years. His most significant work is considered THE GIRL IN THE GOLDEN ATOM, a 1920 novel, the plot of which he recycled for a Captain America tale.
TAMA OF THE LIGHT COUNTRY, serialized in Argosy Weekly in 1930, begins with a midnight raid on a girls camp in Maine. Ten of the teenagers are missing, a couple of others, as well as councilors, are dead.
Jack Dean is a reporter that gets in on the story as it starts to leak out. He’s joined by his friend, Jimmy Turk, both flying up to join the investigation. Reports of mysterious lights, other attacks and missing girls.
One of the campers, a young woman named Rowena Palisse, has a familiar name. Her brother, Guy, had blasted off from Earth ten years before on his homemade rocket headed for the Moon and hadn’t been seen since. A battle soon happens when three figures appear and seem to try to grab Rowena. The huge figure escapes, the smaller one is shot and the hovering one is also shot and turns out to be a young woman with wings, her dying breath being “give warning…”
One of the investigators is a Dr. Grenfell, a man in the process of building his own spaceship, the Bolton Flying Cube. Something strange appears in orbit and Jack, Rowena, and Jimmy and a crew go up with Grenfell to see retrieve it before it burns up in the upper atmosphere.
What they find makes up the bulk of the book, a manuscript from the missing Guy Palisse explaining his whereabouts these past ten years. He’d ended up on Mercury and found people living there. The Light Country was that fairly temperate band around the planet that bordered the face always toward the Sun, the Fire Country, and the backside, eternally cold, the Cold Country. They looked human in every respect, but smaller, owing to the small size of Mercury. The females were born with wings and, by law, had to have them clipped when married. As long as they remained virgins, they kept them.
That didn’t sit well some of the females and they began to rebel. Tama was one of them, a leader. Things get really rough when Roc, a jealous fellow, pushed through a law making it mandatory for females to be clipped when they turned sixteen. Roc was the son of a man who’d tried to conquer the High Country years before and then fled to the Cold country when unsuccessful.
Guy and a few sympathetic males band with Tama and the others and flee, refusing the new law. They hide in the outer country and that sets up the males, who were building
their own spaceship to go to earth to steal females. The pages in the orbital craft are Guy’s attempt to warn Earth.
The Bolton Flying Cube sets off to chase the Mercury ship headed back home, Mercury still fairly close(9an orbit around the sun every eighty-eight days).
TAMA, PRINCESS OF MERCURY, serialized in 1931, finds the people of the cold country, under the command of Roc, planning to conquer the Light Country. The inhabitants, though human, are adapted to fight the extreme weather, huge with layers of fat to protect them. They had secretly built another ship and went to Earth to find Tama, grabbing her, along with Rowena and Jimmy Turk, who’d they’d drugged to get the location of the women out of him.
The Bolton Flying Cube is off to Mercury again to find the women and prevent war.
The first was the best of the two, though not quite up to Burroughs, the measuring stick in my mind of all such sword and planet adventures. There’s a third tale, a novella titled AERITA OF THE LIGHT COUNTRY, available in an eboo with the first two. I haven’t read that one.
For the next few Fridays, Todd Mason is gathering the links for Friday’s Forgotten Books over at SWEET FREEDOM., Check them out.
