The Invisible Death, by Victor Rousseau

Posted on April 6, 2023 by skullsinthestars

Five days until my book Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not to Be Seen is released! Here’s another classic blog post I did about invisibility in science fiction.

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Will I ever run out of vintage science fiction stories about invisibility to write about? I hope so, because otherwise my book draft will never be polished off.

Some authors of weird fiction seem to be addicted to invisibility. One notable example is H.P. Lovecraft, who published The Dunwich Horror in 1929 and In the Walls of Eryx in 1936, together with Kenneth Sterling. The former story is about an invisible monster that is released upon the unsuspecting town of Dunwich, and the latter is a science fiction story about an invisible maze on the planet Venus and the prospector who gets trapped within it due to his greed.

Another notable example of an invisibility addict is Victor Rousseau. Only days ago I wrote about his 1916 novel The Sea Demons, about a race of invisible aquatic humanoids who plan to rise up and conquer the surface world. Yesterday…

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Invisibility is an April 2023 must-read book for NBIC!

Posted on April 5, 2023 by skullsinthestars

I learned about this a few weeks ago, but forgot to post about it here! My upcoming book on Invisibility was selected as a “must-read book” for April 2023 for The Next Big Idea Club!

The Next Big Idea Club is a membership club that focuses on bringing the most interesting new non-fiction books every year to its audience. To quote from their page:

We are all hit by a tsunami of content options every day – never in human history has there been so much to read, watch, forward, swipe and winky-face. Over 600,000 new books are published every year. On YouTube, 300 new hours of video are uploaded every second. Where do you even start?

At the Next Big Idea Club, we believe you start with the people behind the ideas : writers, both established and up-and-coming, who engage, inspire, and motivate readers to make changes in their lives and the world.

Neuroscientists, historians, biologists, economists, journalists, psychologists, entrepreneurs … Next Big Idea Club authors come from a wide range of backgrounds. What they all share is a love of discovery, of investigation and exploration, and equally important, a love of communicating their stories and insights in entertaining, memorable ways.

So do we. We are believers – we think that the right book, the right speech, the right new habit, the right insight on what makes us tick, the right cautionary tale or clarion call or I-just-can’t-take-it-anymore rant — even the right tidying tip — at the right moment, can be life-changing.

Our goal is to make sure that everyone has access to these transformative ideas, and to nurture a community to discuss and build upon those ideas—both with each other and directly with the authors themselves.

I am very excited and honored to be chosen! I recorded some short audio files for the club to hit some of the key insights of the book, and am delighted that my book is being recognized in this way. I’m looking forward to everyone getting a chance to read this book.

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Slan, by A.E. van Vogt

Posted on April 5, 2023 by skullsinthestars

Less than a week before the release of my book on the history and science of invisibility! Here is another reblog of classic science fiction invisibility to celebrate…

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Yet another story that features the physics of invisibility, continuing my series of posts inspired by the research into my upcoming book on the history of invisibility physics!

A secret race of mutant humans, gifted with superpowers, hides out from the bulk of humanity that hates and fears them and seeks to exterminate them utterly.

If this sounds familiar, you might be thinking of the classic Marvel comics series X-Men, but in this case I’m referring to the much earlier novel by A.E. van Vogt, Slan, first published in serial form in 1940 and then made into a book in 1946. (Image from the contemporary edition that I read.)

Slan is a classic of science fiction, and A.E. van Vogt’s first novel. Like many serialized stories of the time, it is a fast-paced tale with lots of twists and turns (and things that don’t completely makes sense if you…

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The Shadow of the Beast, by Robert E. Howard

Posted on April 3, 2023 by skullsinthestars

Just 8 days left until the release of my book on the history and physics of Invisibility! Here’s another post about a classic invisibility story, this one more of supernatural horror…

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Another post about an invisibility story, from my researching into my book on invisibility physics.

Sometimes a little bit of bad luck can turn into some good luck. To fill out my bibliography on invisibility fiction, I wanted to include The Shadow of the Beast, a thrilling little story by Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the barbarian and author who inspired the title of this blog. However, I realized that I had apparently given away my one REH book that includes The Shadow of the Beast (TSB), which turns out to be quite a rarity in the Howard oeuvre.

TSB was one of REH’s early stories, and was unpublished in his lifetime. In fact, it was first published in a chapbook that was published in 1977, and was copyrighted that same year, meaning that unlike other REH stories, it is not in the public domain, and hasn’t been…

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Valley of Invisible Men, by Edmond Hamilton

Posted on April 2, 2023 by skullsinthestars

My upcoming book on Invisibility includes an Invisibibliography of all the invisibility stories I found before finishing the draft. As the following story indicates, there are still more to be found…

I am amazed that I can still find even more science fiction and horror stories about invisibility, even after I’ve researched for hours! My most recent discovery is “Valley of Invisible Men,” by Edmond Hamilton, that appeared in the March 1939 issue of Amazing Stories. The lead pages of the story are shown below.

This story is a rather standard “lost world” type adventure, where a daring protagonist ventures into dangerous unexplored lands, meeting hostile natives, falling in love, and encountering lost technology!

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The Sea Demons, by Victor Rousseau

Posted on April 1, 2023 by skullsinthestars

Another sci-fi story about invisibility from the archives, to remind you that my book on the history and science of invisibility comes out April 11th! I have some “new” invisibility stories to blog about in the near future, too…

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Continuing a discussion of odd stories of invisibility in fiction that I came across in writing my book on the history of invisibility physics.

Pulp stories are sometimes quite a ride. They can be filled with bizarre ideas and twists and turns that are often largely nonsensical, tailored to bring people back to read what happens in the next issue.

One spectacular example of this is The Sea Demons, by Victor Rousseau Emanuel, first serialized in All Story Weekly starting in January of 1916 and then published as a novel in 1924. In August of this year, Armchair Fiction released a reprint of this otherwise hard to find novel:

This book is a wild ride and, relevant to my interest, features an undersea species of near-invisible humanoids, who threaten to destroy the surface world!

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The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz, by Jules Verne

Posted on March 31, 2023 by skullsinthestars

Continuing my review of classic invisibility science fiction stories leading up to the release of my book Invisibility on April 11th! Here is a post I originally did back in November of 2021.

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My book on the history and physics of invisibility is off to the publisher for final approval, though there’s still some little stuff I want to add, including a comprehensive bibliography of stories about invisibility. Along the way, I’ve read a lot of stories about invisibility in science fiction, and I thought I’d share some thoughts about some of those books, since there wasn’t enough space — or excuse — to go into detail on all of them in my own text.

With my cat physics book, I was surprised at how many little things I learned even up to the final weeks before sending it to the publisher, and with my invisibility book, it has been no different. I did a last-minute literature search to see if there were any interesting stories about invisibility I had missed, and came across a novel written by none other than the famed…

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Sinister Barrier, by Eric Frank Russell

Posted on March 30, 2023 by skullsinthestars

Continuing my review of classic invisibility science fiction stories leading up to the release of my book Invisibility on April 11th! Here is a post I originally did back in June of 2021.

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Writing a book about the history and science of invisibility has led me to read things that I would otherwise never have encountered, including a whole slew of science fiction tales about invisibility and invisible creatures. I thought I would blog about a few of them, especially considering not all of them will be commented on in my final book!

The first one I want to share is Sinister Barrier, published in 1943 and written by British author Eric Frank Russell. I read the 1985 edition, shown below.

The “sinister barrier” of the title is the boundary between those frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can see, that we call visible light, and those frequencies beyond, where who knows what may be lurking? (Technically, we can image in all those frequencies in modern times, but in 1943 this was a reasonable premise.)


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For Love, by Algis Budrys

Posted on March 29, 2023 by skullsinthestars

Okay, we’re only about two weeks away until the release of my latest popular science book, Invisibility: The history and science of How Not to Be Seen! In the run-up, I thought I’d reblog my old series of posts on invisibility stories in sci-fi, and include some new stories that I haven’t blogged about yet! This is the first of those new posts, about a little-known story by a classic sci-fi author.

I freely admit that I am not as familiar with science fiction as I should be, considering how much I love any sort of fiction that steps outside of our familiar reality, be it science fiction, fantasy, or horror. One author whose work I discovered only relatively recently is Algis Budrys (1931-2008). I think Budrys is most known for his 1960 novel Rogue Moon, which I read a couple of years ago and completely forgot to blog about! The novel tells the story of a mysterious alien artifact discovered on the moon, which can be entered but is a massive deathtrap that kills anyone who makes a misstep inside of it. But the United States has invented a technology to create quantum doppelgängers of people on the moon that will pass their memory to the originals and can in principle explore the interior and “safely” die. But most humans cannot mentally handle the strain of experiencing death, so it falls upon the research team to find a person stubborn enough to survive dying again and again…

It’s a really cool idea, and I enjoyed the novel, so when I came across an invisibility story by Budrys, “For Love,” I was immediately intrigued.

As you can see, “For Love” appeared in the June 1962 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, and it is particularly noteworthy to me for coming about as close as I’ve seen in imagining how modern real invisibility devices are supposed to work!

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The first copy of Invisibility has arrived!

Posted on March 2, 2023 by skullsinthestars

I just wanted to post a short note to say that I’ve received the first copy of my book on the history and science of invisibility, and it looks great!

I’m very excited for people to get a chance to read this, and I’m very happy with how it turned out! It can be pre-ordered through pretty much any bookstore, and the Yale University Press site has links to all the major sellers.

I’m going to be doing a book blitz on this site over the next month, as the book comes out April 11th! I am planning to repost my long series of articles on various science fiction invisibility stories, and include some new ones along the way!

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