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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