Category Archives: books

Two Duds: WAS IT MURDER? by James Hilton and A QUESTION OF PROOF by Nicholas Blake

Posted on August 9, 2025 by JE

Fiction set at upper-class British schools was a popular genre in the 19th and early 20th C, and murder mysteries were the dominant form of popular fiction in the early and mid-20th century, so it’s only natural that cross-pollination would … Continue reading →

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This Way to the Egress: IMMORTALITY, INC. by Robert Sheckley

Posted on July 8, 2025 by JE

Executive summary: Immortality, Inc., Sheckley’s first novel, is a fast-moving tour of wonders and horrors, well worth reading, even if its individual parts are greater than the novel as a whole. The novel goes by a number of different names. … Continue reading →

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Where Ignorance Is Blish: PLANET STORIES, July 1951

Posted on July 4, 2025 by JE

If an evil fate cast me back in time to the late 1930s, and I were compelled to join one of the factions emerging in the tempest-filled teapot of early sf fandom, I would probably side with the Futurians. They … Continue reading →

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Bookalanche!

Posted on July 2, 2025 by JE

Past Me is sometimes a deadly enemy. For instance, he only left me two pieces of pizza from the other night so that I could celebrate the first day of True Summer with the Breakfast of Champions–cold pizza and hot … Continue reading →

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Science Fiction and Mr. Brown

Posted on June 6, 2025 by JE

Much of the short paragraph below by Fredric Brown is outdated and/or not meant to be taken seriously. But I like his conclusion about sf, which I would broaden to include fantasy (as sf often did in those now-distant days: … Continue reading →

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Dial D for Diogenes

Posted on June 2, 2025 by JE

Reading Diogenes Laertius through for the 1st time. Before I’d only read specific bios, like his account of Diogenes the Cynic. DL seems to be agnostic regarding philosophic schools, interested in philosophy more from a historical and literary point of … Continue reading →

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Alphonso I, Conqueror of Erewhon

Posted on May 21, 2025 by JE

One of the features or bugs of reading five or six books at a time is that sometimes you finish them all in the course of a day and then wander around feeling strangely bereft. One of the books I … Continue reading →

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18th Century Mashup: White’s MISTRESS MASHAM’S REPOSE

Posted on May 7, 2025 by JE

I came to T.H. White’s brilliant fantasy Mistress Masham’s Repose (Putnam, 1946): immediately after reading two much inferior (but not worthless) books. One was by White himself, The Age of Scandal (Putnam, 1950), a social history of the later 18th … Continue reading →

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The Future of the Past: F&SF, January 1963

Posted on April 22, 2025 by JE

In my ceaseless quest to avoid useful work, I recently opened up an old magazine from my double-stacked shelves of old sf/f zines, this one being the January 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. “This is … Continue reading →

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King Leer

Posted on April 18, 2025 by JE

Reading some Middle English this afternoon, I came across the word lere, meaning “face”. ”That’s got to be where leer comes from,” I said, with the unwavering confidence of a folk etymologist, and then my confidence wavered a bit and … Continue reading →

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