Reprints of Classic Early Space Fiction

On Wed, 19 Jul 2006 19:08:17 -0500, Pat Flannery
wrote:

Verne had a distinct anti-Jewish tinge to his writing at points, and
their are a lot of anti-black aspects to his work also.

....And again, it's always been rather a waste of time to denounce
and/or villify writers of the past for writing about events, beliefs
and social mores that today we find politically incorrect. What's done
is done, we simply shouldn't do it anymore.

Unless, of course, we're talking about the Frogs...

OM
--
]=====================================[
] OMBlog - http://www.io.com/~o_m/omworld [
] Let's face it: Sometimes you *need* [
] an obnoxious opinion in your day! [
]=====================================[

On Wed, 19 Jul 2006 13:47:20 -0700, Ron Miller wrote:

...what I can do is make a separate volume of "Man Who Rocked the
Earth" for those who need only that title. Would that work for you?
I'll let you know when it's available...

Cool!

Still... that list looks good, Ron.

Thanks! It's been fun and a chance to get copies of books I've long
wanted myself. A number of these titles are available as free etexts
online, but (and I don't know about you guys) I like to have books that
I can actually hold in my hand. I've also made an effort to make these
books attractive (I take great pains with the interior design) and with
features not found in any of the available ebooks, such as
illustrations, appendices, etc.

Alas there are no few potential buyers who simply
can't read printed text anymore... if they ever
could.

That's why open, unencrypted, ebook formats that
each user can adapt to their needs is so
important to those of us who loved to read
books... but can't anymore.

(Oh crap... I just realized... the last printed
book that I ever read, with a scanner and
magnification, was... Maxson's crap... *sob*)

Plain text is best, with html for image management
if images are included. but PDF's will do

I've also kept the prices almost at cost, so the books are about as
inexpensive as POD books can be.

Don't short yourself The prices are very nice
but you need to make back enough to make it worth
your while to keep publishing. Raise the prices
a bit if it will help pull things together.

Yes, I said that. This is called "enlightened
self-interest"

By the way, the Black Cat edition of "Off On A Comet" includes
considerable material---including one full chapter!---not included in
the Gutenberg etext (as well as something like 100 illustrations).

Ah... but are the images available in the
electronic format as well? I can't read printed
text anymore, but I can magnify it onscreen and
using that same magnification I can magnify and
piece together images...

Ron

--
Chuck Stewart
"Anime-style catgirls: Threat? Menace? Or just studying algebra?"

On Wed, 19 Jul 2006 17:45:06 -0700, Ron Miller wrote:


Hey, can those of us who've already bought
"The Moon-Maker" get a discount or an
upgrade?

If you already have Moon-Maker and can wait a couple of days, I will
provide The Man Who Rocked the Earth as a free download. Ditto to
anyone else who would like to do that.

Way cool I can provide the lulu.com
receipt data or other such as a kind of
proof-of-purchase.

R

--
Chuck Stewart
"Anime-style catgirls: Threat? Menace? Or just studying algebra?"

Chuck Stewart wrote:


By the way, the Black Cat edition of "Off On A Comet" includes
considerable material---including one full chapter!---not included in
the Gutenberg etext (as well as something like 100 illustrations).

Ah... but are the images available in the
electronic format as well? I can't read printed
text anymore, but I can magnify it onscreen and
using that same magnification I can magnify and
piece together images...

No---I'm afraid that the artwork is not included in the Gutenberg nor
any other electronic text that I know of.

R

In message , Chuck Stewart
writes
On Wed, 19 Jul 2006 04:57:11 -0700, Ron Miller wrote:

(Even in the face of such utterly fair ebook
pricing the zapkitty's "opportunistic" gene
remains in high gear...)

I recently upgraded "The Moon-Maker" to include its immediate prequel,
the 1915 "Man Who Rocked the Earth", a James Bondian thriller...

Hey, can those of us who've already bought
"The Moon-Maker" get a discount or an
upgrade?

...

What?... What are you all looking at me like
that for?

If you've seen the latest series of "Doctor Who", 'upgrade' will have a
whole new meaning :-)

Ron Miller wrote:

All true...but to be fair, he had a number of black characters---such
as those in North Against South---who are portrayed heroically.


Remember "Mysterious Island"? Remember which of the castaways had such a
knack for communicating with Jupiter the Orang-utan?*
Have peek at note #90:
http://home.netvigator.com/~wbutcher...mi%20notes.htm
Yup, Neb! Neb the black servant who has a way with that ape.
Neb doesn't come off anywhere near as bad as Frycollin in this regard
though.
Of course, when he's not painting unfortunate literary images of Jews or
Blacks, there's always the Germans to go after, and that
none-too-cleverly disguised caricature of Alfred Krupp in "The Begum's
Millions" in 1879 showed he was not terribly taken by the Prussian
invasion of 1870 and giant German Cannons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Begum's_Millions

*Who should have been in the movie BTW...Giant insect? Yup. Giant
cephalopod? Yup. Captain Nemo? Yup.
Exploding Volcano? Yup. Cute, personality-filled monkey? Nope. Giant
goofy-looking carnivorous flightless bird? Unfortunately, yup....we need
Jup.
Ditch the giant free-range chicken, and get that Orang-utan into the
story! Orang-utans are right up with Chimpanzees in the cute department,
and far less likely to bite your face off as adults who become too
personality-filled.
This why "Jason" and "Sinbad" get remembered as being as better than
"Mysterious Island"...because they both had the one audience draw
greater than a CPFM...REANIMATED SKELETONS! That still works, just ask
Disney!

Pat

Ron Miller wrote:

The falukah was tossed
this way and that, as if caught in a simoon, and he was rolled hither
and yon in the company of Chud Abdullah, and the headless mullet..."



"Headless mullet"? How can you have a hairdo with no head?
Yeepers! I thought those flying brains in "Fiend Without a Face" were a
scary concept...just think what it would be like to attacked by a
disembodied nuclear-mutated 'do!
Maybe he means the fish...I've heard of fishing with hand grenades, but
this is going too far.
I always wondered how people mutated into C.H.U.D., and this
radioactivity may explain it, as there's apparently one in the story,
and a Islamic one at that.

"Though many persons must have lost their lives, the records are
incomplete in this respect... Reaching Sfax they reported their
adventures and offered prayers in gratitude for their extraordinary
escape; but five days later all three began to suffer excruciating
torment from internal burns, the skin upon their heads and bodies began
to peel off, and they died in agony within the week."




Wells' said he based a lot of his story on Rutherford's "The Power Of
Radium"; I wonder if this author read the same work and they are both
doing different takes of what a atomic bomb would be like.

Pat

On Thu, 20 Jul 2006 02:19:47 -0500, Pat Flannery wrote:

This why "Jason" and "Sinbad" get remembered as being as better than
"Mysterious Island"...because they both had the one audience draw
greater than a CPFM...REANIMATED SKELETONS!

Some of my early TV memories are of running up to the DuMont to change
channels whenever "Jason and the Argonauts" came on. Couldn't stand that
movie!!

That still works, just ask Disney!

Does Mary-Kate Olsen have a new movie out?

Dale

On Thu, 20 Jul 2006 02:46:49 -0500, Pat Flannery wrote:

Wells' said he based a lot of his story on Rutherford's "The Power Of
Radium"; I wonder if this author read the same work and they are both
doing different takes of what a atomic bomb would be like.

Of course.... (You fool!

Wells just imagined all of the decay
compressed from millennia into days.

Train and Wood just imagined all of the decay
compressed from millennia into an instant.

In reality nuclear weapons compress some of
the decay from millennia into an instant.

So in the "prescience sweepstakes" Train and
Wood come out way ahead... but, as it has
been often noted before, few good writers
deliberately try to *win* that game. They
just try to write a good story with
sufficient accuracy to satisfy needs. And it
sometimes happens that they hit close to the
mark.

Pat

--
Chuck Stewart
"Anime-style catgirls: Threat? Menace? Or just studying algebra?"

On Thu, 20 Jul 2006 06:29:00 +0000, Jonathan Silverlight wrote:

Chuck Stewart writes

Hey, can those of us who've already bought
"The Moon-Maker" get a discount or an
upgrade?

If you've seen the latest series of "Doctor Who",

While it takes about 5-6 hours of
stop-and-go-and-backtrack-and-repeat to
piece together a mental image of what a
show is trying to convey, and I get things
wrong of course, the new Doctor is one of
the few shows I make the effort for.

(And the family is convinced that the
continuous radiation from the computer
monitor couple of inches from my face is
doing me no good

...'upgrade' will have a whole new meaning :-)

While the new Cybermen are impressive, I
kinda prefer the older "Cordwainer Smith
Scanners run amuck" Cybermen to these newer
"Borg-clone Dalek-wannabes."

--
Chuck Stewart
"Anime-style catgirls: Threat? Menace? Or just studying algebra?"