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From Things To Come into The Space Trilogy-A Final Aside
I'm still catching up on last year, on my reading and writing. After reading 1985 by Anthony Burgess late in the year, I read another dystopian novel, Anthem by Ayn Rand. This was the first time I had...
View ArticleOne More Thing . . .
So, what we have so far:In working on this series, I have quoted from a website, which shall remain nameless:A member of the Pulitzer Prize jury, the late Frank McConnell helped science fiction gain...
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From Things to Come Into The Space Trilogy-Part Three
First published in 1943, Perelandra Lewis is an astonishing work of the imagination. It is the middle book of C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy and superior, I think, to the first, Out of the Silent Planet,...
View ArticleFrom Things To Come into The Space Trilogy-Part Four
H.G. Wells reappears in That Hideous Strength (1945), the last volume of C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, this time as a fictionalized character. Before getting to that, I should point out that the title of...
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From Things To Come into The Space Trilogy-Part Five
There are now more parts to this series than there are to The Space Trilogy. It's been this way for several days now. This is the end of it, though, and it comes on a momentous day in English history...
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The Humblest Things . . .
Ruthless, predatory--they arrive. They will make of their new empire a purely material thing, made and engineered for their own benefit and for the ruination of everyone who is not they. But then all...
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From War of the Worlds into Star Trek
I think the history of science fiction is evolutionary: there have probably been few really radical events. In 1953, Paramount Pictures released The War of the Worlds, a big-budget adaptation of H.G....
View ArticleWeird Tales #363 at Half a Year
I'm still catching up on things from last year. Some of these things are moving pretty slowly, though, so the catching up is easy. In late July 2019, it was announced that Weird Tales would be back...
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Gahan Wilson (1930-2019)
Cartoonist, Illustrator, Author, Editor, Essayist, Movie Reviewer, Book Critic, ScreenwriterBorn February 18, 1930, Evanston, IllinoisDied November 21, 2019, Scottsdale, ArizonaGahan Wilson had the...
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A Century of Forteana
December of 2019 marked the centennial of Charles Fort's first published book, The Book of the Damned. From it flowed a good deal of fantasy and science fiction and a good deal more of pseudoscience....
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A Flying Saucer Lineage
In my previous article, I wrote about a picture drawn in 1920 of what look like flying saucers. Some of the details are wrong. For example, the occupants ride in gondolas slung under the main body of...
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Wells and Cabal Again
The image from my previous article, the aeronon of the twentieth century, is from the book Predictions by John Durant, published in 1956. In his book, Mr. Durant quoted from the original source:As...
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Cabal in New York, 1939
I noted in July last year that 2019 was the 80th anniversary year of what is now called cosplay. The first cosplayers were Forrest J Ackerman and his friend Morojo, who went to the first World Science...
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The Mysterious Dolgov-Part One
I have written before about the artist Boris Dolgov, dates currently unknown, who contributed to Weird Tales in the 1940s and '50s. You can read what I wrote about him by clicking here. Almost nothing...
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The Mysterious Dolgov-Part Two
Readers have suggested two possible identities for the Mysterious Dolgov. Hannes Bok is one. The other is Boris Artzybasheff. Boris Artzybasheff (1899-1965)Once or twice a century, an artist comes...
View ArticleThe Mysterious Dolgov-Part Three
One of the things about this ever-expanding Internet is that sources that were unavailable even a week ago are now suddenly here before us. I first wrote about Boris Dolgov on August 27, 2016. At the...
View ArticleThis Boring Apocalypse
I have been away for five weeks and now back again I write.The apocalypse has come and it's nothing like we thought it would be. There are no zombies clawing at the door, no gun-toting commies or Nazis...
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The Mysterious Dolgov-Part Three and a Half
A month ago I wrote part three of this series on The Mysterious Dolgov. Then the world came to an end. Since then, my copy of Frederik Pohl's memoir The Way the Future Was has been sitting on the...
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Katherine MacLean (1925-2019)
Aka Charles Dye, G.A. MorrisAuthor, Essayist, Artist, Teacher, Laboratory TechnicianBorn January 22, 1925, Glen Ridge, New JerseyDied September 1, 2019, Arundel, MaineSince the end of the world came, I...
View ArticleThe Mysterious Dolgov-Part Four
Here is what we know about Boris Dolgov:First, he was an artist who drew pictures for fantasy and science fiction magazines from 1941 to 1954. Most of these were for Weird Tales.Second, he collaborated...
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