Labor Day is a day for the working citizen of the U.S. to relax… but not science bloggers! This is a reminder that there’s 15 days until The Giant’s Shoulders #3, to be held at Entertaining Research. Entries can be submitted, as always, through blogcarnival.com.
Hmm… that reminds me that I’ve got to get cracking on my entry!
This is entertaining. Roald Dahl, famous author of children’s stories such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and nasty little shockers such as Man From the South, was apparently a spy for the British government during World War II. His job? He was part of a group tasked with getting U.S. involvement in the war, and his role was gathering intelligence from wealthy women.
This is not necessarily surprising, in hindsight; Dahl wrote a number of very randy stories, including a very nasty one called The Visitor, about a playboy named Oswald Cornelius who has one sexual adventure too many. Dahl’s stories contain a significant amount of cynicism, which one might expect from a man whose task was to exploit women romantically and sexually for information.
I wrote a ‘horror masters’ post on Dahl some time ago, and it can be found here. This is the second surprise spy revelation within a month; thank goodness Julia Child was apparently tasked with a different sort of information gathering.
I just received in the mail the other day my copy of Valancourt Books’ edition of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle: A Mystery. The Valancourt edition is the definitive edition for the collector, with an introduction by Richard Marsh scholar Minna Vuohelainen and detailed notes putting the novel in its proper historical and literary context. As with other Valancourt Marsh books, it also reproduces the original cover art:
It’s quite a lovely volume! To celebrate the release, I’ll be posting over the next week about other works of Richard Marsh that I’ve been reading.
Over the past few months, I’ve been throwing in a ‘shout-out’ to some smaller press publishers who specialize in classic and hard-to-find weird fiction; some original posts on the topic can be found here and here. A few weeks ago the finance/marketing director of Wordsworth Editions Ltd, Derek Wright, dropped a nice comment in my original ‘shout-out’; since it appeared in an old post, I thought I’d reprint the comment in its entirety here:
Thanks for the mention of our Mystery & Supernatural series, which I stumbled across purely because I was reading your other notes while I was researching for possible new titles. As a small company (there are only three of us), we welcome suggestions from readers, so if anyone would care to have a look at our list, and comes up with something that we really should be doing, drop us a line on the website. The only specific requirement is that they need to be out of copyright (70+ years after the author’s death – we can’t squeeze royalties into a £2.99 R.R.P.) Mmmm, Flaxman Low, now there’s an idea…
Wordsworth Editions is one of the two small press publishers (along with Valancourt Books) which I am particularly fond of. They’ve been reprinting a number of classic tales which would otherwise be quite inaccessible. I highly encourage people to check them out; you won’t be disappointed!
Ugh. I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather and unmotivated to blog for the past week. I’m thinking I may have come down with some mild illness that’s slowing me down (or maybe that illness is simply the start of the new academic semester).
Anyway, I’m struggling again to find some scientific topics to blog about. If you’ve got any requests, feel free to drop them in the comments below. Keep in mind, though, that I’m a theoretical physicist who specializes in classical optics: I’m not going to write a general relativity post any time soon!
This is just my way of saying Blake Stacey has been absorbed into scienceblogs.com, part of the Seed Media Group. He is now in the distinguished company of such great science blogs as Pharyngula, A Blog Around the Clock, and erv. I’m updating my blogroll accordingly.
Don’t recognize the title quote? I’m a little tired of the constant ‘Borg’ references that get passed around every time someone gets assimilated into scienceblogs, so I thought I’d try and steer the analogy in another direction.
C’mon… Seed… pods… what’s the difference? 🙂 In any case, congrats to Blake!
Oh, as long as I’m updating my blogroll, I thought I should note that I’m also adding the APS ‘Physics Central’ blog!
I read much of Robert R. McCammon’s work when I was younger, but somehow I managed to read only his ‘lesser’ works, such as Stinger (1988), Wolf’s Hour (1989), and The Night Boat (1980), and completely missed the books widely considered to be his masterpieces, namely Swan Song (1987) and Boy’s Life (1991). It’s possible, in the case of Boy’s Life, that it was published after I had ended my initial interest in horror fiction, but I suspect that I simply wasn’t mature enough to bother with a story about a boy growing up in a small Alabama town in 1960.
I recently decided to take another look at McCammon, and started with Boy’s Life. I have to say: wow. Boy’s Life is good, and not just ‘horror novel good’ — it’s ‘literary novel good’.
My friend Personal Demon has reminded me (and belatedly congratulated me) on my one-year blogging anniversary, which I began writing on August 14th, 2007. I had completely forgotten the date. Thanks to everyone who has been reading my posts so far; hopefully the next year will result in even better writing!
Well, I’m back from Chicago, and my fossil hunting expedition! My abilities to find fossils on this trip can be summarized by one word: FAIL!!!
This was a field trip sponsored by the Field Museum of Chicago, a place I spent much time at in my youth. For at least 20 years, they’ve sponsored fossil hunts in the Mazon Creek area. My dad and I participated in one some twenty years ago, as mentioned in this post; in recent months, I suddenly got the urge to go back and try my luck again.
I just thought I’d mention that I probably won’t be posting for a few days: I’m heading to the Chicago area to go on a fossil hunt with my Dad! On top of that, as soon as I get back the semester starts and I have to make sure my course is in order. I may still throw something on the ‘tubes over the weekend, especially if the fossil hunting is fruitful, but no promises!
In other blog news, a flurry of interest in my short post on Leavenworth’s underground city catapulted my blog views over 50,000!
Here’s a few links for those who need something to read (The Linkin’ Log: August 22, 2008):
The author of Skulls in the Stars is a professor of physics, specializing in optical science, at UNC Charlotte. The blog covers topics in physics and optics, the history of science, classic pulp fantasy and horror fiction, and the surprising intersections between these areas. 
Skulls in the Stars 