The Best-Kept Secret
29/03/2023
By admin
Being an easy pushover for a good UFO book (something I’ve not shaken since my childhood), I’ve just read Jacques Vallée’s and Paola Harris’ Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret. It’s an account of a hitherto unknown UFO crash in San Antonio in 1945 very close to Ground Zero where the Manhattan…

Robert Aickman’s Introduction to The 5th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1969)
10/07/2021
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Aickman’s fifth introduction is brief. He summarises his previous views: that ghost stories are separate from both horror and SF and that its “true affinity” is with poetry as it is “a projection and symbolisation of thoughts and feelings” that are excluded from usual written discourse. Ghost stories, he believes,…

Robert Aickman’s Introduction to The 4th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1967)
03/06/2021
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Aickman leads his fourth introduction to the Fontana Ghost Stories collection with a renewed attack on modern rationalism: “science will end the world,” he asserts. He goes on: “Even if there is no big bang, we shall destroy the world in no time, if we go on as we are….

Some Thoughts About Caitlin R Kiernan’s Black Helicopters
15/04/2021
By admin
Professor Zeh sits in his office in Heidelberg. It’s 1969. Rain falls outside and Zeh’s office window is nothing but a dark grey rectangle. He’s smudged the ink in his notebook, jotting down a thought about Bohr’s interpretation of measurement he had while staring at his reflection in a mirror…

Robert Aickman’s Introduction to The 3rd Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1966)
13/03/2021
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In this introduction to the third Fontana collection of Great Ghost Stories, Aickman engages with the nature of our desire to read supernatural fiction. He views it as “the need we all must feel for some degree of reconciliation with death”. Ghost stories themselves haunt modern society, allowing imaginary freedom…

Robert Aickman’s Introduction to The 2nd Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1966)
06/03/2021
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Little new ground is covered in Aickman’s second introduction to Fontana’s Book of Great Ghost Stories series (1966). He retreads his previous suggestions about the nature of ghost stories from the first volume and notes that the 1960s seem to favour Nineteenth Century arts (ghost stories, music), blaming the “new…

Robert Aickman’s Introduction to The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1964)
28/02/2021
By admin
Between 1964 and 1972, Robert Aickman sought to define the canon of supernatural stories and collected them in a series published by Fontana. The introduction to the first Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1964) has a bleak, nihilistic tone. Aickman sets the contemporary view of the ghost story in…

Michael Moorcock’s “The Dreaming City” (1961)
27/12/2020
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Moorcock’s The Dreaming City is the first short story featuring Elric, his silver-skinned Melnibonean hero. The story appeared in the wake of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (published between 1954 and 1955) as well as the renaissance of interest in Howard’s Conan tales (from 1932), Leiber’s Fahfrd & Grey…

The Construction of Lost Hearts by M.R. James
17/12/2020
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M.R. James’ Lost Hearts is a tautly-constructed short story with an impressive economy of narrative. It’s a macabre tale of an elderly occultist luring children to his home and murdering them in an attempt to magical powers and immortality. An unnamed narrator (James?) relates the tale. It seems to me…

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
03/10/2020
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ENTRY FOR THE FIRST DAY OF THE TENTH MONTH IN THE SECOND YEAR AFTER THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH-WESTERN HALLS This evening I finished reading Piranesi, Susanna Clarke’s new novel. When I closed the book it was dark outside and I needed to turn the light on in the…

Some Thoughts About Caitlin R. Kiernan’s Agents of Dreamland
06/09/2020
By admin
After the desert of ebony sand, there’s a great city of spiralling towers and crystal domes. Beyond the city is a vast methane ocean as still as glass. Furious storms travel the ocean. Benzene falls like snow. Ancient beings hunched over machines on this planet detect NASA’s New Horizons interplanetary…

Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter of Mars
08/08/2020
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I’m currently working my way through Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom series of pulp adventure novels. A Princess of Mars, the first of the series, was a surprisingly enjoyable romp reminding me of a mix of Gulliver’s Travels, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. While I’ve always been aware of John Carter,…
“Learning” and “Path-following”
30/07/2019
By admin
I’m reading Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful The Old Ways. Early on he connects learning and path-following: The relationship between thinking and walking is also grained deep into language history, illuminated by perhaps the most wonderful etymology I know. The trail begins with our verb to learn, meaning ‘to acquire knowledge’. Moving…