I thought Richard Matheson was going to live another 15 years. But, he didn't.
I remember the first story I read my him, and I remember it vividly. "Born of Man and Woman." Yech.
He pretty much founded the genre of the cannibal zombies, with "I am Legend," which has been filmed three times. That must be some kind of a record.
He also wrote most of the good original "The Twilight Zone:" episodes.
Posted by Bob Wallace, why couldn't a bunch of rappers die instead?
Richard Widmark died a few years ago at 93. I had seen all of his movies except the first one, which has the classic scene of Widmark pushing an old lady down the stairs. I finally saw it, and Widmark came across as a really good psycho killer!
Posted by Bob Wallace, who wishes guys still wore cool hats.
I think the first novel I remember reading was Abraham Merrit's Dwellers in the Mirage. I was 11.
I've read two of his other novels but Dwellers is the best one. It's not science-fiction but Lost World science-fantasy.
It's got tenacled monsters who want maidens sacrificed to him, seductive witch-women, and battles galore. Blood, Beasts and Breasts, as Joe Bob Briggs said is essential to good movies and good literature.
He was of course right!
Posted by Bob Wallace, who still dreams of Kalk-ru.
A kinetic bombardment is the act of attacking a planetary surface with an inert projectile, where the destructive force comes from the kinetic energy of the projectile impacting at very high velocities. The concept is encountered in science fiction and is thought to have originated during the Cold War. Non-orbital bombardments with kinetic projectiles, such as lobbing stones with siege engines such as catapults or trebuchets are considered siege warfare, not kinetic bombardment.
Project Thor is an idea for a weapons system that launches kinetic projectiles from Earth orbit to damage targets on the ground. Jerry Pournelle originated the concept while working in operations research at Boeing in the 1950s before becoming a science-fiction writer.
Posted by Bob Wallace, who heard about this from Jerry Pournelle
I first heard about Project Orion in college when I read John McPhee's "The Curve of Binding Energy. Launching 200-ton spaceships by dropping atomic bombs out of the bottom. Oh man!
Jerry Pournelle, who is still a supporter of it, once wrote a novel, "King David's Spaceship," about it.
If we had gone with it, we'd have colonies on the Moon...Mars...spacestations. But as usual, the people in the government are idiots.
Posted by Bob Wallace, who is still annoyed he has no flying car and a blaster.
The first novel I read that impressed upon me the necessity of an armed populace as a bulwark against the depredations of the State was A.E. van Vogt's The Weapon Shops of Isher, published in 1951. I even remember where I read it: in Anthony Boucher's two-volume A Treasury of Great Science Fiction. Last story in the set, book two. I still have my copies.
It was an eye-opener to my 12-year-old self, who had never given any thought to civil government and the State, and the distinction between the two. At the time, I didn't know there was a distinction. It certainly wasn't taught in school, a bore-me-to-distraction quasi-prison which thought the best way to teach me to read was with Dick and Jane and Spot and Pony, and not Rudyard Kipling and Mowgli and Shere Khan and the Bandar-Log, the Monkey Tribe that put democracy into action by periodically getting together, shaking the tree branches and screeching, "We all say so, it must be true!"
It had never occurred to me that the State was inherently cruel and unjust and capricious, and ultimately would always abuse the citizenry, which it considered, more than anything else, as childish, annoying and expendable. If you had asked me, I probably would have said it was supposed to be our friend. You know, Social Security, the Best and Brightest from Harvard and Yale running the show . . . things like that.
Van Vogt saw straight into the nature of the State, just as he saw through the adults blind enough to believe it was their friend, at least until its fist crashed down on their skulls and knocked the pointy right off of their pinheads. These people, van Vogt informed his readers, always consider themselves patriots, and anyone who disagrees with the policies of the State as a traitor. Until the truth woke them up, a waking up that generally involved their property being stolen by that disorganized gang of criminals that pose as politicians.
The novel, set in the year 4784, is about the eternal conflict between those who want to be free, and those who wish to enslave. The first believe in armed citizens; the second, who wish everyone disarmed, believe only in the State. Ominously, van Vogt refers to the State in that far off year as "the Empire." Art imitates life, and now life is imitating art.
Let's see . . . 4784 minus 1951 is 2,833 years into the future. Even then, the eternal conflict between liberty and slavery still rages. Looks like there's no quick fix to the imperfections in human nature, a nature that if it wasn't imperfect, wouldn't create States in the first place. That certainly puts the kabosh on those who believe if society and civil government were destroyed, the essential goodness of human nature will shine forth.
In van Vogt's future, the only place citizens can buy weapons is the Weapon Shops, the motto of which is "The Right to Buy Weapons is the Right to be Free." The Weapon Shops recognize the Empress, but their weapons and defenses are superior to the Empire's. Because of this, the Empire can only not defeat the Weapon Shops, it can't even touch them.
There is a lesson here: Ideally, the citizen's weapons would always be equal or superior to the government's. That's the sole purpose of the Second Amendment: to make sure the people are as well-armed as the potential jackboots. That way, the wanna-be Gestapo will always think twice before trying to make inroads into people's rights. "An armed society is a polite society," wrote Robert Heinlein.
States always try to disarm citizens. "[T]o disarm the people (is) the best and most effective way to enslave them . . . ." wrote Founding Father George Mason.
Things have changed since then, for the worse. Now we've got Demo-Commies like Diane Feinstein stating, "If I could've gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them . . . 'Mr. and Mrs. America , turn 'em all in,' I would have done it."
In-between Mason and Feinstein we had Heinrich Himmler: "Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA. Ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State." Replace " State " with "Empire" and you've pretty much got the essence of van Vogt's plot in one sentence.
Into this mess 2,833 years hence, we find one Fara Clark, who thinks of the Empress as "the glorious, the divine, the serenely gracious and lovely Inneda Isher, the one hundred eightieth of her line." This is a mere human being he is speaking about, one he considers almost god-like, the way the Japanese considered the Emperor a god.
Fara is the pinheaded "patriot" of which I spoke. He waxes very wroth when a Weapon Shop shows up in his little village. The fact the weapons are so technologically advanced they are tuned only for defence, but not offense, doesn't even penetrate. His mind is as closed as a clam. To him, it's "my Empress, right or wrong" (about that comment, G.K. Chesterton wrote, "'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.'").
Fara's son Cayle is a different story. He says of his father, "He thinks we're living in heaven, and the Empress is the divine power." Father and son do not get along. Fara is the stand-in for the "conservative" who is blind to the true nature of the State and thinks it deals in fairness and justice, and that the people who run it are the Good Guys; his son, much more clear-headed, instead casts his lot with the anti-State, pro-liberty Weapon Shops.
There is no need to go into the plot in any detail, except to say one of the themes is that of Innocence to Experience, far more for the stubborn father than for the son. I do have a few criticisms of the book, though. Van Vogt assumes the Weapon Shops are so technologically ahead of the Empire that the Empire is helpless against them, and that the Shop's weapons are tuned to the owner's mind, so they cannot be used for aggression. It's a neat little trick that makes liberty invulnerable against the State. Unfortunately, we're not even close to the point. It's nice to imagine it could be true, though.
Still, for all its flaws, the novel had a profound effect on me. It made me realize States always deal in force and fraud, whereas the pro-liberty Weapon Shops used only persuasion, non-aggression, and self-defence. It's the difference between what Albert Jay Nock, in his classic, Our Enemy, the State, referred to as the Political Means and the Economic Means. It's the difference between slavery and freedom.
Every dictator and would-be dictator would not only despise this novel, but ban it. We need look no further than what Adolph Hitler wrote: "The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subjected people to carry arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subjected peoples to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing."
If I was stuck on a desert island with only the choice of two books,
one of them would be Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s “Leftism Revisited” for non-fiction.
For fiction, it would be Robin Buss’s translation of “The Count of Monte Cristo.”
This is not a children's novel. It is full of revenge, mass rape, murder, suicide, insanity, horrible bloody executions, drugs (specially hashish and opium), theft, betrayal...you name it, this novel has it.
This is a great book, and I highly recommend it.
Posted by Bob Wallace, who has a sword just like the Count's.
The first one of F. Paul Wilson's novels I read was The Tomb, which was about the rakoshi, sort of ambulatory landsharks that et people. It was pretty cool, if I can say.
The second one was Conspiracies, which I reread a few days ago. This one is way cool, too, and as an added bonus makes fun of all those goofy conspiracist types who believe in the black helicopters and other stuff like that.
This novel, like The Tomb, has Repairman Jack in it, who is a guy who lives off the grid, has no bank account, deals only in cash, and gold, has no SS number, and pretty much tries to stay invisible. He also has lots and lots of guns and stuff even better than guns, like a flamethrower.
Wilson is definitely Sudden Curve-quality stuff.
Posted by Bob Wallace....aka Repairguy Bob.
When I was a young but precocious chile I read a story about two guys in a flying car who swooped down too low and creamed an eight-year-old girl. It happened at 10:01 am, hence the name of the story.
At 11 am the driver had been tried and convicted, and the last line of the story was, "Att 11 am, James 'Poxie" Smith was vaporized." I thought, cool, 59 minutes after the murder he was croaked.
I had been unable to remember the name of the story until I spent 50 cents for a copy of "Analog 6" on the remainder table, and there was the story, by Alexander Malec.
Posted by Bob Wallace, who sez, if only.
I had meant to write about this novel for a while, but kept forgetting.
I can't begin to describe this complex but amazing novel. This is really good stuff, what science fiction should be.
I will describe a little bit of it, though. Intelligent dog packs, intelligent plants whose intellect is enhanced by the machines in which they live, the galaxy divided into different zones of intelligence (Vinge had to have gotten this from Poul Anderson's Brain Wave), killer alien butterflies (pretty but genocidal against humans)...I figure this is enough.
Theodore Sturgeon once commented that "90% of science fiction is crap." This novel falls intot he ten percent that isn't. Too bad Sturgeon wasn't around to read this; he would have praised it up one side and down the other.
Posted by Bob Wallace, who has a Skrode of his own, and if he want to know what that is, read the book.
Posted by Bob Wallace, who's read most of Norman's books, and thinks he's stoned all the time.
I mostly read science fiction, fantasy and horror, but occasionally I'll read something serious, like Stark Young's So Red the Rose, which was written in the '20s or '30s and was a bestseller in those days.
I was raised in the lower Midwest, near the Ozarks, and am descended from Scots-Irish hillbillies from Tennesee and Kentucky. I don't consider myself Northern, aka damn Yankees, but instead a combination of Midwestern and Southerner.
As far as I'm concerned, the South was overwhelmingly in the right, and too bad the North won, which only happened because they were far more industrialized than the South.
So Red the Rose is an intimate look at a bunch of Southern families during the War Between the States, and does not have the grand sweep of Gone with the Wind.
The author, Stark Young, came as to the same conclusion I have, that the conflict between North and South runs back to industrialized England marauding though Scotland and Ireland, only transplanted to the U.S. So now we have those damn Yankees in D.C. (Bush is not a Texan or cowboy; he's a Yankee) attempting to wipe out the U.S., and I see this country's salvation lying in the hands of Midwesterners and Southerners, certainly not all the nancy-boys on the East and West Coasts.
So Red the Rose is a heck of a good novel, and it should be taught in school.
Posted by Bob Wallace, who is a Scots-Irish Ozarkian hillbilly.
I ran across this novel when I was 11 and was lost to the normal world forever and was permanently changed and I don't mind at all BWAHAHAHA!!!
Posted by Bob Wallace, who doesn't mind that Martian women lay eggs cuz they sure are no chickens!
I stopped by a small-town library a few weeks ago and on the discard table found a book called Hot Rod, by Henry Gregor Felson.
It was a Young Adult novel, but with a cover like that, I picked it up.
It's a surprisingly good book, and I found that Felsen was famous for writing these YA hot rod novels.
The first thing that surprised me about it was the author, in 1950, wrote about the 17-year-old driver "rocking and rolling" the car he had built.
I've always thought that was a nautical term, but apparently hot rod enthusiasts of those days picked the term up.
This isn't a feel-good YA novel. There are six or seven deaths in it, all caused by kids speeding -- and the author correctly notes speed is a drug for some kids.
Even adults would enjoy this. And how I wish I could have built my own jalopy out of junked parts, the way these kids did.
Posted by Bob Wallace, who sez, VROOM!
About 20 years ago I used to frequent this used-book store that was three stories tall and had, if I remember correctly, 250,000 volumes in it. Or was it half a million? I forget.
One day I was standing near the counter when a very strange-looking man came in and asked the owner if he had a copy of the Necronomicon.
He wasn't looking for the parody that has been created. He clearly thought it was a real book of spells, and he wanted a copy.
Too bad it wasn't real. It would have been funny to see this nut sucked into another dimension by one of Lovecraft's Elder Gods.
Posted by Bob Wallace, who knows who Yog-Sothoth is.
...this is a real book.
Posted by Bob Wallace, who will never read it, or if I do, I'll never admit it.
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