Monthly Archives: December 2011

Curious: y/n?

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

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Vampire-imps and dangerous sociality in Mongolia.

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

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Victorian Hugos for 1889

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

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Hey.

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

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The steam-powered canoe that went 127 mph.

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

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Some little known facts about hoboes.

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

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Pulp science fiction before the science fiction pulps.

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

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Sometimes I post things for no particular reason…

except that they interest me.

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A world with no redemption: Islam without the Mahdi.

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

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Semi-serious question.

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

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