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Mark Twain’s Sketches Old and New, first published in 1882, is an anthology of his earlier works, sweepings and scrapings of his various observations and lampoonings from thirty years as an editor and writer. In that, it’s very interesting how similar it is to the collections other artists might offer today. Among them are observations of specific professions (watchmakers, barbers, doctors, chambermaids and newsroom hangers-on), races (Irish, Chinese, and those who bait them) as well as stand-alone bits. That Twain was anti-government is apparent in his many mockeries of its massive size and complexity (even for its day, particularly in […]

Another dip with the iPad Kindle reader in the pool of Project Gutenberg, this time a pulldown of Astounding Stories, July 1931. Astounding Stories was the pulp monthly that later grew and grew, becoming Analog, whose existence, with the closing of our local scifi shop and the general inability of the current generation to read anything longer than 144 characters, is a fact just short of amazing these days (yes, monthly for eighty years). So it’s a nifty and back-laughing view of the “past’s future”, six stories of plucky heroes (all of them men, all of them sterling and bold, […]

Short stories are often a neat little side-jaunt from longer and windier stories. And sometimes it’s a delight to discover a story from a collection by an artist crossing a genre into something he normally does not do. So that’s why I delighted in The Red Room, an old H.G. Wells story I discovered in the collection The Plattner Story and Others, easily obtainable via Project Gutenberg (right here). Maybe because I’d had a long week and was comfortably tired, perhaps that’s the reason this “ghost” story appealed. Maybe because I had a beer in my gut, that it was […]

Finally, a book for the left! I’ve grown tired with right-leaning sausage-grinders. I’ve also grown tired of the old plotline, that aliens who come to earth have a hidden agenda. I got through Live Free Or Die with bleeding eyeballs. So it’s nice, sometime, when aliens ARE beneficial, when communication and coexistence and cooperation actually work. It’s just too bad that in doing so, The Serene Invasion loses a bit of its edge. The the race we name as the Serene come to Earth and make big changes. I’m not sure why they dome some of our cities, since they […]