The Shoals of Reality
I'm back after having been gone for four weeks. I would like to pick up again on some of what I previously wrote about in "Skilled Destroyers," from May 20, 2017. In that entry, I wrote about how the...
View ArticleThe Supernatural in Science
I don't want to overstate the idea that science fiction writers are progressives of the materialistic or atheistic type. To believe in earnest that human beings are nothing more than a soup of...
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Happy Flying Saucer Day!
Seventy years ago today, on June 24, 1947, the first flying saucers were seen near Mount Rainier in Washington State by private pilot Kenneth Arnold. That first sighting kicked off a worldwide...
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The Listeners
I wrote the other day that materialists and atheists are unlikely to reach out into the vast universe. That isn't entirely true. There is in fact a class of people who claim to believe in nothing and...
View ArticleBeyond the Finland Station
I finished reading To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson last night. I'm glad to be out from under the shadow of this book, not only because of its excessive length--484 pages in the Doubleday Anchor...
View ArticleMarx, Holmes, and Lovecraft
It's the start of a new week and time to be done with old things and begin with new. (I write this on Monday for posting on Tuesday.) This will be the last in my series referencing To the Finland...
View ArticleAnti-Apocalypse
As I write and think about the alternative futures of Dystopia and Apocalypse, it occurs to me that the picture isn't complete. It occurs to me also that I may have misinterpreted the meaning of...
View ArticleIt's Mad, Mad, Mad Max World
More on Utopia/Dystopia and Apocalypse:What we think of as apocalyptic literature is probably not apocalyptic in that it isn't Christian or biblical. In fact, it's usually entirely secular and may...
View ArticleFor Freedom
Today, July 4, 2017, we celebrate our independence, but we also celebrate an idea larger than mere independence. There are nations now that became independent during the twentieth century, yet have...
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Animals in the Uncanny Valley
At the end of these hot and humid days, I watch movies in the dark. The night after watching Mad Max: Fury Road, I saw Jurassic World (2015) on DVD. The movie opens with a scene showing a CGI bird of...
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I Walked with a Zombie
Next came I Walked with a Zombie, from 1943. People of today like their mashups--an odious word. Well, I Walked with a Zombie could easily be subtitled Jane Eyre Meets the Walking Dead. It's the story...
View ArticleTrue Detective
I guess I'm catching up on my viewing from 2015, the HBO TV series True Detective included.Few people remember it today, but in its first incarnation, Weird Tales had a companion magazine called...
View ArticleContact
Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral.--V.I. Lenin, Summary of Dialectics (1914)Without intending to, I...
View ArticleThe Summer of Flying Saucers
This was the summer of flying saucers. On June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot out of Boise, Idaho, saw nine bright, shining aircraft in formation near Mount Rainier, Washington. He was not...
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Another Silly Season-Part One
Seventy years ago this summer, the flying saucer phenomenon, a potent myth for the postwar era in America, began. For years after Kenneth Arnold's first sighting in June 1947, flying saucers were...
View ArticleAnother Silly Season-Part Two
In 1952, now sixty-five years in the past, came another silly season, or if you like, another summer of flying saucers. That summer began with an event that is meaningful only in retrospect, for on...
View ArticleBarker and Bender on the Case-Part One
On Friday, September 19, 1952, a week after the sighting of the Flatwoods Monster, a twenty-seven-year-old movie theater booker left his office in Clarksburg, West Virginia, for Flatwoods with a...
View Article11/22/63 and the Conspiracies of History
I was in the middle of something when I last wrote, and I'm planning to pick up again where I left off. I would like to write about something simple before I get back to writing about something more...
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The Pantry on the Edge of Forever
I feel like Columbo . . ."Just one more thing . . ."After writing the other day about 11/22/63, I realized how much it has in common with "The City on the Edge of Forever," an episode from the first...
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A Little (or a Lot) on Algernon Blackwood
About once a month, I meet with a weird fiction book club to discuss some short works by a given author. In our past two meetings, we have talked about the works of Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951). For...
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