Rudolph Kohn's Blog

Returning to a Sci-Fi Satire Classic: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!

I loved this book back in the 1990s when I first read it. I even went so far as to buy a big collection of the whole series, and enjoyed the hell out of it. But I gave it to a friend, so it had been over twenty years since I had read this book, when I picked it up recently for a review!

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A Reading: The Floor Above, by M. Humphreys

I read the second issue of Weird Tales without anything jumping out at me as worth talking about, and had gotten through a good chunk of issue three... was I in the wrong state of mind? Or was I being too stringent?

Then, this story jumped out at me and I decided to do a reading. Only later, when I started looking into this story, did I learn two things:

1) Lovecraft liked this story enough to mention it in a letter,

and 2) It seems as though nobody knows who M. Humphreys was.

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A Short Reading: FEAR, by David R. Solomon

This is a strange story. I wouldn't call it amazingly good, but it does manage some excellent gory descriptive language and has an easy-to-miss message about priorities, and how much those different priorities are worth. It's a sympathetic while somewhat anti-climactic ending.

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First Impressions: Don Quixote!

This is a whale of a book. I think that I spent a few hours combing through various versions until I found this one, which was the first one that didn't seem to be significantly abridged.

The whole thing is over twelve hundred pages.

The translation I'm looking at is by John Ormsby, from 1885, and others have said this version is both "thorough and accurate."

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Thoughtful, Creeping, Slow-Burn Dread: Review of "A Revenant," by Walter de la Mare!

I wanted to do a reading of this one, but I think it's still under copyright! So, a review instead.

I was looking through Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" looking for authors or stories to read and talk about, and one of those authors is better known as a poet and a writer of children's stories. Still, Walter de la Mare did jot down the occasional creepy story, often with a strong focus on characters.

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Larger-than-Life Sci-Fi Adventure Continues: Skylark of Valeron!

I felt like it was time for a return to the good old pulp adventures of E.E. "Doc" Smith, so I gave Skylark of Valeron a read!

This book starts with a somewhat hasty rewrite of a scene from the last book: Remember when DuQuesne appeared to... die? Well, as you may have expected (and as you definitely expected if you've read enough Smith), it was a ruse! DuQuesne is alive and well and is hatching a dastardly plot, as is his wont.

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Review: Robert E. Howard's "The Shadow Kingdom"

First published in Weird Tales all the way back in August 1929 (Volume 14, No. 2), this story is the first appearance of Kull of Atlantis, a character Robert E. Howard would write several short stories about and who would be part of the inspiration of his later character, Conan.

It's a major milestone in the sword and sorcery genre, and you can read it free:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Weird_Tales/Volume_14/Issue_2/The_Shadow_Kingdom

This story is short but it does a lot. It establishes the character and background of Kull, some of his major allies, and one of his major motivations: to fight the serpent-men!

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The First Feist Book I Ever Read: Krondor: The Betrayal

The first dose of Raymond Feist's world of Midkemia I ever got was not from a book. It was from an old computer game called Betrayal at Krondor. Back in the mid-1990s, we had a copy of the CD version of the game and I found it really interesting, especially the writing. The intro to the game mentions Feist, but I was too young to make the connection.

Then, one day, as I was wandering around in probably a Borders bookstore, I saw a book: Krondor: The Betrayal. I was taken aback. Was the game based on a book? Later on I would discover, no, it was the other way around, but I picked up that book and it made me into a Feist fan.

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Looking at the John Carter Movie

An excellent video by a channel called Memovision crossed my feed the other day, and he did a great examination of the John Carter movie, made by Disney in 2012, and part of the reason why you aren't seeing these great pulp, public-domain stories made into movies.

Ostensibly Memovision's video is about the flop of the movie, but he did some digging and found out some stuff that must have been hard to find.

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Justice, Duty, Mercy, and Revenge: A Surprisingly Good Ghost Story

Let's be honest: lazily-written ghost stories are pretty common. That's not what I'm talking about today.

"The Ghost Guard" by Bryan Irvine (Archive version or Wikisource version) is a surprisingly good ghost story. One that, in the veil of a fairly trite genre, managed to say, or at least hint, interesting things about valuable ideas like justice, duty, mercy, and revenge.

It's not unpredictable, and it's not complex, but it does a good job of building up atmosphere and a peculiar sense of ambivalence about the main character.

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