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History of the Persian Empire, by A.T. Olsmtead, came out in 1948. It’s quite a monster – 524 pages – and must have been the epic of that time. Anything you wanted to know (at least in 1948) is in this book. My point in picking this up was to reacquaint myself with the Persians before having to speak about them at book functions. After all, its been twelve years since I did my heavy-lifting research for Early ReTyrement and, no, I don’t remember everything I’d read or known or discovered, not that long ago. It’s interesting though – he […]

Short story this time – the magnificent tale of a planter who refuses, against man and nature and the very gods, to abandon his scientifically-run plantation to a sweeping wave of ants. Written by Carl Stephenson for Esquire in 1938, it carries all sorts of themes across its short length. We have the white man’s burden (that is, the blunt Leiningen boosting, rallying, even threatening his squealing fearful natives to hold the line against this formicidaen army). We have the application of science to solve all problems, from the initial success of the the orderly, modern plantation to its defense […]

The poor Palm. The Palm is a splayed formation of land under a two-mooned sky, overrun twenty years ago by TWO empires, the Ygrath from the west, the Barbarior from the east. Since that invasion, the land huddles like Czechoslovakia beneath Germany and Russia. Worse, so bitter was the fighting in the west and so angered was the Ygrathian ruler with his son’s death in that campaign that he destroyed the two cities of the primary state which had stood against him, toppling its towers, grinding the survivors under heavy taxation, and even magically striking the original name of the […]