Burn, Witch, Burn! by A. Merritt

Posted on March 23, 2022 by skullsinthestars

I’ve long been a fan of the works of Abraham Merritt (1884-1943), a talented and successful writer of weird fiction, and have blogged about many of his works. His 1920 novel The Metal Monster is one of my favorite works of weird cosmic horror of all time, which starts with its protagonists discovering a long lost tribe of Persian warriors and it gets even weirder from there.

A couple of months ago, I happened to think to myself that I needed to track down and read the few Merritt novels that I haven’t read yet, and as if he was reading my mind, that very day Wayne of Wayne’s Books put up a slew of lovely Merritt editions for sale. I bought quite a few, such as this four-pack:

The only one of this bunch I hadn’t read yet is Burn, Witch, Burn! (1932), which represents a significant departure from his earlier works. I just finished it this week and thought I’d share some thoughts on it.

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Posted in Horror | 3 Comments

Eliza Young owns some scientists (1816)

Posted on February 14, 2022 by skullsinthestars

This is a belated post for the International Day of Women & Girls in Science, which was on February 11. In this post, I honor those women who never had a chance to get into science due to societal and cultural restrictions, even though they were capable. This anecdote will appear in my upcoming book on the history of invisibility.

Thomas Young is rightly regarded as one of the greatest scientists of the 19th century, and one of the greatest of all time. In the early 1800s, he argued, against the scientific consensus, that light has wave properties, and he was of course absolutely correct.

Portrait of Young by Henry Perronet Briggs, 1822

As I’ve blogged about previously, however, in the short term Young was attacked for his work by a bitter rival, and this caused him to withdraw completely from scientific research in 1804 to focus on his medical work, with the exception of publishing in 1807 his massive work, A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts.

That same year was not completely bad, however; on June 4 of 1804 he married Eliza Maxwell, who was related to the Scottish aristocracy through the family of Sir William Maxwell of Calderwood.

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Posted in History of science, Optics, Women in science | 2 Comments

Old School Dungeons and Dragons: Part 23

Posted on January 7, 2022 by skullsinthestars

Let’s continue to collect those old school D&D threads that I share on twitter!

The Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor, by the Judges Guild staff (1978). This one is a true classic of old school gaming!

Judges Guild, which still does stuff today, got their start as an official licensed producer of D&D products. They lost that license, but continued to put out D&D-friendly supplements for years.

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Posted in Dungeons and Dragons, Entertainment, Fantasy fiction, role-playing games | 1 Comment

The Handyman, by Lester Barclay

Posted on December 21, 2021 by skullsinthestars

Let’s tackle another invisibility story! This one is a little different, in that it is a story about an imaginary invisible friend!

“The Handyman,” by Lester Barclay, appeared in the October 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures. It is short and sweet, so this will be a very short blog post! Spoilers follow… you can read the story on archive.org in advance if you like.

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Posted in Invisibility, Weird fiction | 2 Comments

RIP Mandarin, 2010-2021

Posted on December 20, 2021 by skullsinthestars

This past Friday, a beloved member of my extended kitty family, Mandarin, was helped on his way to the next life. Mandarin was diagnosed early this year with a rare and untreatable brain tumor. Beth did everything possible to make the remainder of his life happy and comfortable, and it was.

Mandarin in July of 2015.

I wanted to share some memories of this beautiful boy, as I’ve done for other dear departed felines in my life.

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Posted in Animals, Personal | 1 Comment

Priestess of the Moon, by Ray Cummings

Posted on December 20, 2021 by skullsinthestars

More invisibility? Okay, sure, why not.

I may be cursed to blog about invisibility in fiction for the rest of my life. While preparing a post about McGivern’s “The Visible Invisible Man,” I suddenly realized that there is another story about invisibility in the very same issue of Amazing Stories!

As you can see from the short description, “Priestess of the Moon,” by Ray Cummings, features a woman fighting against an invisible being before disappearing herself. It is in fact another invisibility story, and quite frankly a very silly one. Let’s take a look… spoilers again, though I don’t think anyone will be particularly upset in the case of this story.

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Posted in Invisibility, Science fiction | 2 Comments

The Visible Invisible Man, by William P. McGivern

Posted on December 16, 2021 by skullsinthestars

Here’s another invisibility story — again, my book on the history and physics of invisibility will be out next year!

The last we saw of William P. McGivern was his story “The Chameleon Man,” published in January of 1942. But it turns out that this wasn’t McGivern’s first invisibility story! That honor (presumably — he might still have an early one) goes to “The Visible Invisible Man,” published in the December 1940 issue of Amazing Stories.

Like McGivern’s later story, “The Visible Invisible Man” is also a comedy. I found it much more effective than the later one, though. You can read it here before reading my post if you want.

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Posted in Invisibility, Weird fiction | 1 Comment

The Plague of the Living Dead, by A. Hyatt Verrill

Posted on December 15, 2021 by skullsinthestars

One of the best things about studying history is the serendipitous discoveries one can make. This post is about one of those: while tracking down various stories about invisibility, I learned of the story “The Plague of the Living Dead,” by A. Hyatt Verrill, which appeared in the April 1927 issue of Amazing Stories.

I stumbled across this story while researching Verrill’s invisibility story “The Man Who Could Vanish,” and it’s easy to see why it captured my attention: the modern “zombie” craze in fiction is usually traced to George Romero’s classic 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead, but here we have a story that is decades earlier talking about the living dead!

Night of the Living Dead (1968) - Sidewalk Film Center & Cinema

Verrill’s “Plague of the Living Dead” is a fascinating and surprisingly gruesome story. Though it probably did not influence the modern zombie genre, it definitely anticipated much of it. Let’s take a spoiler-filled look at it. You can read the original story here beforehand if you want. Note: some significant body and animal horrors described in the story.

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Posted in Horror, Lovecraft | 2 Comments

Cloak of Aesir, by Don A. Stuart

Posted on December 13, 2021 by skullsinthestars

This is the last of my daily run of blog posts for now, marking the 30th post in a row! Most of them have been on invisibility in fiction, and we wrap with a fascinating example. I’ve still got more invisibility to post, but I won’t try to do them every day…

Is there a word for finding the correct thing by mistake? That is basically what happened with the next story of invisibility to discuss, “Cloak of Aesir,” by Don A. Stuart, published in the March 1939 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction.

So why was I mistaken? Well, here’s the description of “Cloak of Aesir” from the table of contents:

A man and the Sarn-Mother and a cloak of blackness— and the old Sarn-Mothcr couldn’t hate that human enemy!

The description of the “cloak of blackness” is what caught my attention, as it certainly sounds like something invisible-y! In the story, however, the cloak is easy to spot in most circumstances, as long as there is light around. Nevertheless, the story also includes invisibility devices, so I found an invisibility story for the wrong reason!

But this story is special for another reason: it uses some physics to explain the “Cloak of Aesir” that I’ve never seen in a science fiction story before! So let’s take a look. Significant spoilers ahead, so if you want you can read the story in advance.

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Posted in Invisibility, Science fiction | 9 Comments

Ghost Planet, by Thorne Lee

Posted on December 12, 2021 by skullsinthestars

The penultimate post on invisibility in fiction in my attempt to blog 30 days in a row! I’ve got more stories to blog after that, but this will probably be the end of my continuous run.

So we’ve technically already had one story about an actual “Invisible World,” but Ed Earl Repp’s story clearly didn’t go far enough — the world itself wasn’t invisible, it just had an atmosphere that guided light around it, acting like a cloaking device. But what if the entire planet, and everything on it, were perfectly invisible? That’s the story in Thorne Lee’s “Ghost Planet,” which appeared in the June 1943 issue of Startling Stories:

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Posted in Invisibility, Science fiction | 1 Comment