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About A Voyage To Arcturus by David Lindsay

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Also, the original version of Bambi, "Bambi: Eine Lebens­geschichte aus dem Walde" (Bambi, a Life in the Woods) by Felix Salten.

Was even more grim than Watership Down.

Trope Talk: Small Mammal on a Big Adventure

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NEW QUESTION—I've been asking questions lately. This one is about books, trying to cram as many options as I can into the poll:

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Because of the films featuring the character of Tarzan, most people think of him as a guy in a leopard-skin loincloth swinging around the jungle while barking out barely understandable bad English.

The novels, however, were another thing altogether, with him far more complex and even speaking whole sentences not just in English but in at least three or four other languages.

This is most obvious in the second book in the series, The Return of Tarzan (1913), the first third of which is spent in Paris, where he introduces himself by handing out cards printed “M. Jean C. Tarzan” and amuses himself with smoking, drinking absinthe and going to the musical theater.

Take this bit from Chapter Three of The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Quote

Tarzan shook his head. “You do not know her,” he said. “Nothing could bind her closer to her bargain than some misfortune to Clayton. She is from an old southern family in America, and southerners pride themselves upon their loyalty.”

Tarzan spent the two following weeks renewing his former brief acquaintance with Paris. In the daytime he haunted the libraries and picture galleries. He had become an omnivorous reader, and the world of possibilities that were opened to him in this seat of culture and learning fairly appalled him when he contemplated the very infinitesimal crumb of the sum total of human knowledge that a single individual might hope to acquire even after a lifetime of study and research; but he learned what he could by day, and threw himself into a search for relaxation and amusement at night. Nor did he find Paris a whit less fertile field for his nocturnal avocation.

If he smoked too many cigarettes and drank too much absinth it was because he took civilization as he found it, and did the things that he found his civilized brothers doing. The life was a new and alluring one, and in addition he had a sorrow in his breast and a great longing which he knew could never be fulfilled, and so he sought in study and in dissipation—the two extremes—to forget the past and inhibit contemplation of the future.

He was sitting in a music hall one evening, sipping his absinth and admiring the art of a certain famous Russian dancer, when he caught a passing glimpse of a pair of evil black eyes upon him. The man turned and was lost in the crowd at the exit before Tarzan could catch a good look at him, but he was confident that he had seen those eyes before and that they had been fastened on him this evening through no passing accident. He had had the uncanny feeling for some time that he was being watched, and it was in response to this animal instinct that was strong within him that he had turned suddenly and surprised the eyes in the very act of watching him.

Before he left the music hall the matter had been forgotten, nor did he notice the swarthy individual who stepped deeper into the shadows of an opposite doorway as Tarzan emerged from the brilliantly lighted amusement hall.

Had Tarzan but known it, he had been followed many times from this and other places of amusement, but seldom if ever had he been alone. Tonight D’Arnot had had another engagement, and Tarzan had come by himself.

As he turned in the direction he was accustomed to taking from this part of Paris to his apartments, the watcher across the street ran from his hiding-place and hurried on ahead at a rapid pace.

Tarzan had been wont to traverse the Rue Maule on his way home at night. Because it was very quiet and very dark it reminded him more of his beloved African jungle than did the noisy and garish streets surrounding it. If you are familiar with your Paris you will recall the narrow, forbidding precincts of the Rue Maule. If you are not, you need but ask the police about it to learn that in all Paris there is no street to which you should give a wider berth after dark.

End Quote

Later, after tearing apart a dozen Paris street toughs set on him in an ambush devised by the book’s main villain and then beating the crap out of four policemen who try to arrest him for doing this, (he escapes by jumping out of an upper story window and gets back to his apartments in Paris by swinging from lamp post to lamp post) he even becomes an agent of the French Ministry of War.

Why has no one ever felt the need to write any pastiches based on Jean C. Tarzan, International Man of Mystery?

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Coming, July 2024, The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Mieville.

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Holidays and Days of Note for October 31, 2023

Samhain

Halloween

Girl Scout Founder’s Day

National Caramel Apple Day

National Increase Your Psychic Powers Day

National Knock Knock Joke Day "knock knock", “come in” boom, your “holiday” is gone.

Allantide (Cornwall)

Books for Treats Day

16 New Halloween Books for Adults

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Book Review: The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime

Book Review: The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime by Judith Flanders Great Britain in the Nineteenth Century underwent massive transformation in technology and culture, particularly during the reign of Queen Victoria, who lent her name to an entire era. This book looks specifically at murders of the time, and how they were both…

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Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes: The Online Edition

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Which magazine would you most like to have a complete, restored set of?

Weird Tales 1922 Frankly, most of the stores were below par, "Beloved Dead" indeed, really only famous because of a few notable exceptions.

Amazing Stories 1926 The first all "sciencetiction" magazine. But truth be told, most of the writing was just bad. (and then there was the "Shraver Mystery!") In 1985, when Spielberg decided he wanted a TV series called Amazing Stories instead of just looking for another name when he found the Mag still had the rights to the title, he brought the whole catalog. He flushed it, calling it garbage so they could do stories about Grandpa's ghost train and cute furry critter from space crying over Ricky and Lucy getting divorced.

Air Wonder Stories 1929 Later Wonder Stories, but started with all the stories having "the wonder of flight" theme. It was a thing for a while back then.

Astounding Stories 1930 Under John Campbell brought about the Golden Age of Science Ficton.

Unknown 1938 - 1943 Campbell does fantasy.

Planet Stories 1939 Its gimmick was that all the stories had to be set on a known planet in our solar system.

Captain Future 1940 Science Fiction pulp hero magazine.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 1949 Last of the original greats.

New Worlds 1964, edited by Michael Moorcock and home of the experimental New Wave movement.

Weird Tales 1922 Frankly, most of the stores were below par, "Beloved Dead" indeed, really only famous because of a few notable exceptions.

Amazing Stories 1926 The first all "sciencetiction" magazine. But truth be told, most of the writing was just bad. (and then there was the "Shraver Mystery!") In 1985, when Spielberg decided he wanted a TV series called Amazing Stories instead of just looking for another name when he found the Mag still had the rights to the title, he brought the whole catalog. He flushed it, calling it garbage so they could do stories about Grandpa's ghost train and cute furry critter from space crying over Ricky and Lucy getting divorced.

Air Wonder Stories 1929 Later Wonder Stories, but started with all the stories having "the wonder of flight" theme. It was a thing for a while back then.

Astounding Stories 1930 Under John Campbell brought about the Golden Age of Science Ficton.

Unknown 1938 - 1943 Campbell does fantasy.

Planet Stories 1939 Its gimmick was that all the stories had to be set on a known planet in our solar system.

Captain Future 1940 Science Fiction pulp hero magazine.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 1949 Last of the original greats.

New Worlds 1964, edited by Michael Moorcock and home of the experimental New Wave movement.

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Is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s A Diamond as Big as the Ritz a “Lost World” story in the same sense as The Moon Pool by A. Merritt, She by H. Rider Haggard, or any of a dozen or so Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs?

Much like they go out of their way to not call The Curious Case of Benjamin Button a fantasy story because Fitzgerald is a “serious” writer published in The Saturday Evening Post and Smart Set, and not Weird Tales.

Anyway, you can read the story at the site below.

Then imagine Allan Quatermain or Lord Greystoke being the one who happened on the monster bling and its evil owner.

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Don't forget the ghost of King Hamlet; the ghost might have been behind all the later kills if, instead of a spirit, it was, as was a common belief in the Elizibethian era among protestants, really a demon. At least according to De Spectris by Ludwig Lavater a book published in 1559 that by the time of Shakespeare had been translated into 20 European languages and was thought the best to go to book on ghosts in the England of the time.

Many of the beliefs about ghosts today are from the volume, except that he said that while some spirits were misinterpreting house noises and animals, a small few were miracles, most were demons.

This may have been why Hamlet wanted to check if his visit from his dead dad was really him or something that just wanted to make trouble… demonic trouble.

whoops

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Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

“He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.

-- Raymond Chandler "The Simple Art of Murder."

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A Man Called Spade

Dashiell Hammett's Private Detective Sam Spade appeared in only three short stories and one novel (plus one more short story unpublished at the time of Hammett's death in 1961.)

The stories were:

The Maltese Falcon (1930)

Serialized in five parts, in September 1929 to January 1930 issues of Black Mask

"A Man Called Spade" (July 1932, The American Magazine)

"Too Many Have Lived" (October 1932, The American Magazine)

"They Can Only Hang You Once" (November 19, 1932, Colliers)

"A Knife Will Cut for Anybody" (Unpublished in Hammett's lifetime—published in 2013)

In none of those stories does the yellow-grey-eyed Sam Spade look anything remotely like Humphry Bogart. At least not according to how Dashiell Hammett described him

It's like Tom Cruise playing 6'6" inch Reacher in those two movies.

Anyway, I took Hammett's descriptions of Spade and used Midjourney and Dream Studio and did what I could (it's not as easy as people make it out to be!) to conjure a correct image of Sam Spade.

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Hollywood needs to keep it's incompetent hands off all those books!

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Trope Talk: Faustian Bargains

Neat!

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We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson: English covers