Posted inFiction

The “Lensman” Series by ‘Doc’ E E Smith

[amtap book:isbn=1568658044]

[amtap book:isbn=0739402625]

Descrip­tion: The “Lens­man” series by ‘Doc’ E E Smith is one of the clas­sics of the pulp era of sci­ence fic­tion. A bat­tle between Impos­si­ble oppo­sites, with whole civ­i­liza­tions as pawns and coun­ters in the game. There are bat­tles in space between fleets so large they dwarf whole solar sys­tems, weapons so immense as to stag­ger the imag­i­na­tion, and crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cies that cov­ered galaxies.

Yet at the cen­ter of the series was the bat­tle between the sup­port­ive men­tal giants of the plan­et Arisia and the con­quer­ing Eddo­ri­ans from anoth­er uni­verse. The Arisians find the Eddo­ri­ans too tough to take on them­selves, but find their relent­less phi­los­o­phy of con­quest unpalat­i­ble, and resolve to oppose them. To that end, the Arisians began a slow, mil­lions of years long project to pro­duce the men­tal pow­er need­ed to final­ly elim­i­nate the Eddorians.That tale, told in var­i­ous stages, makes up the sto­ry line.

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Posted inFiction

“The Hypnotist” by Jack Kahler (1966)

John Mered­ith Swift was only 14 years old and he was quite impressed by the hyp­no­tist he’d seen. It was­n’t sur­pris­ing that he tried to imi­tate the man, but, as he dis­cov­ered with young Nan­cy next door, he had to give his voice time to mature a little.

He nev­er lost his fas­ci­na­tion for the art, how­ev­er, and much lat­er … in his last year at col­lege, he had the oppor­tu­ni­ty for an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment. One which caused a young vir­gin to turn up preg­nant, almost cost­ing her life and san­i­ty … and John’s as well …

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Posted inMovies The HiM Collection

“The Hypnotic Eye” (1960) — Part II — The Images

Sev­er­al years ago, I start­ed col­lect­ing any­thing I could find regard­ing the movie “The Hyp­not­ic Eye”. I was suf­fi­cient­ly intrigued about the movie that I want­ed to know every­thing about it, and one way was to get as much para­pher­na­lia about it togeth­er that I could.

I would even­tu­al­ly col­lect two of the pub­lic­i­ty pack­ages, con­sist­ing of news­pa­per arti­cles, infor­ma­tion and ads, one each for both US and British release, which were print­ed on very flim­sy newsprint and so were dif­fi­cult to sur­vive. I also have what I think is a com­plete col­lec­tion of the pub­lic­i­ty stills released for the movie, many com­plete with the descrip­tive text attached to the back. But the biggest addi­tion to the col­lec­tion was a diskette I received from Gil Boyne which con­tained a num­ber of pho­to­graph­ic stills tak­en from when he was on the set of the movie. Many of these images were nev­er used in any pro­mo­tions and most were in col­or, where­as the pub­lic­i­ty stills were all black&white.

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Posted inPersonal

Two Weekends, Two Conventions

The following has nothing to do with the overall subject of the blog yet everything to do with the continual maintenance of the owner of the blog. The past two…