## John Wyndham’s “Web”

John Wyndham (1903-1969) is one of those authors who falls into the category of “famous writer that you’ve never heard of.”  A number of his novels are undeniable classics that were made, and remade, into movies and television series multiple times.  Most people watching those movies, however, are unaware that they are based on books.

I was equally ignorant of Wyndham until a few years ago, when I read several of his most famous works and blogged about them.  You have probably heard of The Day of the Triffids (1951) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), though the latter is much better known by its movie title Village of the Damned.  The Kraken Wakes (1953) is another wonderful novel, depicting a war between humanity and an alien race that lives at the bottom of the ocean; this book is sadly out of print.

It’s been a while since I read anything of Wyndham’s, so I recently picked up a copy of Web (1979).

Web was somewhat of a risky purchase — it was Wyndham’s last novel, and it remained unpublished during his lifetime.  In fact, as you can see from the dates above, it was only released by his estate 10 years after his death!  Without the author’s input in publication, I worried that the book might be a hastily touched-up first draft.  Furthermore, as his last book, I worried that his writing skills might have faded from age and illness (see, for example, Stoker’s Lair of the White Worm).  However, my fears were (mostly) unjustified: Web is a short but elegant little horror novel with its share of interesting ideas.

## Infinity is weird: to infinity, and beyond!

The third and it-turns-out-not-final installment in a series of posts on the size of the infinite, as described in mathematical set theory.  The first post can be read here, and the second here.

I think Buzz Lightyear captures the spirit of this post best:

Who knew that Buzz was such a mathematical philosopher?  ”To infinity, and beyond;” that is a concise summary of what we have seen in the first two posts in this series!  So far, we have seen that we can characterize the “size” of different infinite sets, and that there are at least two different size infinities.  The smallest infinity, the size of which is labeled $\aleph_0$, is the size of the natural, or “countable,” numbers: 1,2,3,4,5, and so forth.  Any set of objects that can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers is of size $\aleph_0$.  What is bigger than this?  It turns out that the set of all real numbers between 0 and 1 is a larger set than the natural numbers!  We label the size of this set as $\mathcal{C}$.  This continuous set of numbers, appropriately known as the continuum, is an uncountable infinity: the set is so infinitely large that it is not possible to even put them in order to count.

That’s crazy enough, but we can even go further: it is possible to demonstrate that there are an infinite number of larger infinities: an infinity of infinities of increasing size!*

Posted in Mathematics | 1 Comment

## Basil Copper’s “And Afterward, the Dark”

I’ve been reading and blogging about the works of Basil Copper (here, here, & here) over the past few months, and have a nice backlog of his works to go through.  Most recently, I finished the second of his collection of short stories released in the United States, And Afterward, the Dark (1977).

Like From Evil’s Pillow before it, And Afterward, the Dark was released by classic publisher Arkham House in a relatively small printing of several thousand copies.  Also like its predecessor, it contains a number of so-so stories and a number of very good stories, in my opinion.

## Infinity is weird: what’s bigger than big?

The second in what will (probably) be a three-part series of posts on the size of the infinite, as described in mathematical set theory.  The first post can be read here.

When I was young, there was a series of jokes of the “what’s grosser than gross?” variety.  Imagine the grossest thing you can, and then ask: what’s even grosser than that?

I don’t really want to talk about the grossest things I can imagine — learning about science and nature has exposed me to more grossness than I ever wanted to know –but on a related note, we can ask the question: what is bigger than big?  Or, to put it in more suggestive language, what is bigger than infinity?

In the previous post, we introduced what we called the “smallest” infinite number, $\aleph_0$.  This is the label for the cardinality, or size, of the infinite set of natural numbers: $1,2,3,\ldots$.  Once we had described how to “count” the size of an infinite set, we were able to demonstrate unusual identities, such as

$\aleph_0+\aleph_0 = \aleph_0$,

i.e. “infinity plus infinity equals infinity,” and

$\aleph_0\cdot \aleph_0 =\aleph_0$,

i.e. “infinity times infinity equals infinity.”

If this were the end of the story, it would be supremely unsatisfying, and hardly even mathematics*, since the conclusion seems to be that there is one size of infinity, and any manipulation of it simply returns the same size infinity.

But this is not the end of the story!  We can demonstrate that there is a bigger infinity than $\aleph_0$, and it has been hiding in plain sight, so to speak, in even some of the most elementary mathematics.

Posted in Mathematics | 12 Comments

## Basil Copper’s “From Evil’s Pillow”

It is always a great joy to discover the works of an author that I’ve previously been completely unaware of.  Recently, I started reading the works of Basil Copper (1924-2013), thanks to the Valancourt Books re-release of his 1974 novel The Great White Space.  Since then, I have read Valancourt’s edition of Copper’s Necropolis, and the as yet not reprinted 1983 novel Into the Silence.  Since then, as I often do when “discovering” a new author, I’ve gone on a buying spree of as many books as I can.  I recently finished reading Copper’s 1973 book From Evil’s Pillow:

This collection of short stories was released by the classic publisher Arkham House, and it was the first book of Copper’s work to be released in the United States.  Arkham would publish quite a few of his books over the decade that follows, and like all Arkham House books they are lovely books to have on the shelf.

But what of the words inside?

## Infinity is weird: how big is infinity?

How big is infinity?  Most people, though familiar with the general concept of infinity, would probably answer with a simple, question-dodging response of “infinite.”  To be fair, the infinite is a really difficult concept to wrap one’s head around, and still causes challenges and puzzles in mathematics to this day.

This is why I’m somewhat proud to have mused on some deeper issues from a very early age.  When I was around 8-10 years old, I distinctly remember explaining to my mother that there had to be different sizes of infinity.  My argument was as follows:

Suppose there are an infinite number of stars in the universe: that represents one size of infinity.  However, every star in the universe contains a huge amount of atoms, and the total number of atoms must also be infinite.  But since, for every star, there are a large number of atoms, the infinite size of the collection of atoms must be larger than the infinite size of the collection of stars.

This was surprisingly deep thinking for a pre-teen, and was at least partially right: there are different sizes to infinity.  However, my argument of how to imagine different sizes of infinity was completely wrong!

To understand why, we need to talk a bit about what is known in mathematics as set theory and the properties of the smallest infinite set, which has a “size” labeled as $\aleph_0$ (being pronounced “aleph-zero”).  What we will find, in this first post in a series, is that infinity is very weird!

Posted in Mathematics | 18 Comments

## Halloween Treats 2013

Every year since I started this blog back in 2007, I’ve been posting a collection of “Halloween Treats”: classic short stories of horror that are freely available to read on the internet. You can read my previous editions:  2007200820092011, 2012 and my 2010 post on the true story of the “Lady of the Lake“. (Hopefully the older links still work!)  I have been trying not to repeat myself in these posts, which makes it a little harder every year to find great stories to link to, but I still managed to find a great collection! (It doesn’t hurt that I have a gazillion books of horror in my library.)

Without further ado, here are 2013′s picks:

The Gateway of the Monster, William Hope Hodgson (1910).  This is the very first of Hodgson’s classic stories about Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, a paranormal researcher with both scientific and supernatural methods.  Carnacki shares the story of his investigation of “The Grey Room,” a chamber in a man’s ancestral home that a source of violent nighttime disturbances and was the location of a horrible set of strangulations 150 years past.  Carnacki’s studies eventually lead to him spending a night in the room, where a catastrophic miscalculation on his part puts him in deadly peril.

Pickman’s Model, H.P. Lovecraft (1927).  This is one of my favorite stories written by the master of horror H.P. Lovecraft, and possibly my very favorite.  Richard Upton Pickman is a Boston artist whose talent is immeasurable but whose horrific choice of subjects — monsters, ghouls, subterranean terror — leads him to be shunned by the art community at large.  When Pickman’s agent agrees to visit the artist’s private gallery, hidden amongst the anonymous back alleys of the Boston slums, he learns the true depths of Pickman’s depravity and the source of the artist’s inspiration.

LD50, Laird Barron (2013).  I’ve raved about Laird Barron on this blog numerous times (e.g. here, here and here), as I consider him to be one of the best authors of horror, living or dead, and he can capture the essence of the twisted and macabre like no one else can.  This year, he generously made one of his stories freely available on the internet.  In LD50, a transient woman starts an affair with a cowboy in the wilds of Washington State.  The region is in a panic because someone is horribly dismembering family pets in the area… and people who enjoy killing animals eventually start on humans…

The Thing From the Lake, Eleanor Ingram (1921).  This is an entire novel, which I’ve blogged about before! Roger Locke, a successful composer from New York City, purchases a home in rural Connecticut as a private working retreat.  On his very first night there alone, however, he is visited in the pitch blackness by two beings: a woman named Desiree Mitchell, who warns him of unholy danger, and an inhuman Thing that wages a battle of wills for Roger’s very soul.  He survives the night, but Roger is as intrigued by Desiree as he is horrified by the Thing, and he resolves to get to the bottom of the mystery.  The situation becomes even more unusual as he learns that over 100 years earlier, a woman named Desiree Mitchell was burned at the stake for witchcraft in the region.  Roger wages a psychic battle with the Thing at night, and his strength begins to wane even as he grows closer to the ephemeral Desiree.  A series of events forces a final confrontation, in which more than one soul is at stake.

Polodo, L.P. Hartley (1948?). What could be nicer than an afternoon picnic on a small remote island outside of Venice?  A brother and sister decide that the island of Podolo would make for a pleasant getaway, though their enjoyment is dampened somewhat by the discovery of a starving stray cat.  Angela attempts to do right by the animal, in her own way, but before long her actions will be writ large in a horrifying way on the island — which is inhabited by more than just a cat.

The Mark of the Beast, Rudyard Kipling (1890).  In India, a drunken Englishman, Fleete, arrogantly defiles the temple of Hanuman, the monkey god, and is bitten by the Silver Man — a leper priest of the temple.  Fleete shrugs off the action, but it soon becomes evident that he has been struck with a devastating curse, and that its cure may be even more terrible than the curse itself.

A Night at an Inn, Lord Dunsany (1916).  How about a little stage play to wrap things up? To conclude, I have to recommend this horror play written by Lord Dunsany, who is known for imagining the incredible fantasy world of Pegana.  Dunsany was absolutely brilliant in capturing the frightening spirit of old folk tales, religions and ghost stories, and he imbues this spirit into this simple tale of a band of thieves who steal from the wrong temple and suffer the consequences.

One more thing: while I’m at it, here’s a real-life unexplained horror story that happened in 1959: the Dyatlov Pass incident.

Have a Happy Halloween!

Posted in Horror, Lovecraft | 2 Comments