Monthly Archives: December 2011

If my next big book was The Encyclopedia of Golden Age Comic Book Superheroes, how many of you would buy it?

This is a chötgör, as rendered by the Aga Buryat (Mongolia) shaman Yaruu. The chötgör are a general class of Mongolian demon/ghost/evil spirit/goblin, but among the Buryat the taken on a vampiric aspect, feeding on human labor, livestock, and eventually … Continue reading →

My new article over at io9. Not the best year for novels, god knows, but the short stories more than make up for it.

Who’s got three thumbs and found a book review from 1835 in which the reviewer claims that the author in question has invented a new genre of fiction: science fiction? Me, that’s who. Full article on io9.com sometime next week. … Continue reading →

Courtesy of the Steam Car Club of Great Britain, here’s a good long article (from, of all places, Wooden Canoe, the journal of the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association) about Fred Marriott’s Stanley Rocket. The Rocket was a canoe on wheels, … Continue reading →

I’m reading Mark Wyman’s Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West, which is very informative, extremely well-researched, and surprisingly smooth reading, and I’m discovering all sorts of things I didn’t know. (“The hobo is a migratory worker. … Continue reading →

As some or many of you undoubtedly know, I’ve been doing research on the pulps for a number of years now, for my Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes (P.S. Publishing, 2013), my The Pulps: A History (2012), and for my chapter … Continue reading →

except that they interest me.

The Mahdi (“guided one”) is, as Wikipedia puts it, the the prophesied redeemer of Islam who will stay on Earth for seven, nine or nineteen years- (according to various interpretations) before the Day of Judgment (yawm al-qiyamah / literally, the … Continue reading →

Occasionally, on my Livejournal I’ve quoted from the Reverend Hughes’ Dictionary of Islam (1896) before. (tl;dr : informative but bigoted). This one got me to thinking: LUNATIC. The Arabic majnun includes all mad persons, whether born idiots, or persons who … Continue reading →