20 Kids' Flicks That Make Grown Men and Women Cry

Bambi | 20 Kids' Flicks That Make Grown Men and Women Cry | Photo 1 of 21 | EW.com: "''Where the Wild Things Are'' has tear ducts on alert; we'll bet you had a bawl at these kids' classics too: ''E.T.,'' ''The Iron Giant,'' ''Old Yeller,'' and more"

Once Again, Texas Leads the Way (Chupacabra Update)

Chupacabra? Creationist Museum Displays Mystery Beast | LiveScience: "Last week a most unusual animal made its world premiere in an equally strange museum in the small town of Phoenix, New York.

The mounted and stuffed beast is claimed to be the elusive chupacabra (the vampiric 'goat sucker' of Hispanic folklore), and is on display for an exclusive engagement through Halloween at the Lost World Museum, run by real estate agent John Adolfi.

Adolfi's chupacabra was found thousands of miles away in Blanco, Texas, in August."

Cult Magazines: A to Z -- Earl Kemp and Luis Ortiz, Editors

The subtitle of this book (which I paid for with my own hard-earned cash!) is A Compendium of Culturally Obsessive & Curiously Expressive Publications. Well, it certainly is, from Ace High Detective to Zest, they're all here, magazines you never knew existed along with those you know quite well. I'll let others tell you about the text. I'm happy for the moment just to be looking at the hundreds of full-color cover reproductions. Wonderful stuff, beautiful to see. I can spend hours with this book. Days. I'll bet you can, too.

Still More Fantastic 1954

Here's the inside of the back cover. I'm pretty sure that the if the age group these ads were aimed at is still reading SF, it's tie-in books or fantasy of some kind.

"Minister without Portfolio" by Michael Fischer (another writer I'm unfamiliar with) is one of those "aliens visit earth" tales with a twist ending that I'm sure I would have loved in 1954. Even now, I think it worked okay.

The experimental story in the issue is Stan Baer's "Night File," which is told entirely through teletyped news stories and the operators' comments. New wave, anyone? I don't know Stan Baer's work, which makes his the third of the six names I didn't recognize in the ToC.

Still Looking for that Perfect Costume?

The Deadly Mantis

Shamus Awards

The Rap Sheet: Making News at the Shamuses: "Tonight’s presentation of the 2009 Shamus Awards brought a few surprises, one of which was certainly the second-in-a-row win by Reed Farrel Coleman in the Best Novel category. These prizes, sponsored by the Private Eye Writers of America (PWA), were given out during a banquet at Indianapolis’ Slippery Noodle bar."

Complete list at the link.

Macavity Awards

Mystery Fanfare: Macavity Awards: "I just presented the Macavity Awards for mystery works published in 2008. I'm in Indianapolis for Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention. Great turn out for the Awards--and a wonderful line-up of nominees."

Go to the link for a complete list.

Awards at Bouchercon

Mystery Fanfare: More Mystery Awards: "There were lots of mystery awards given out at Bouchercon last night, besides Mystery Readers International's Macavity Awards. For the first time, the Derringer Awards were part of the ceremonies. Jim Doherty, one of the original members of Mystery Readers International presented."

For a complete list of the awards, go to the link.

Ed Valigursky, R. I. P.

I've seen the news of Valigursky's death on a couple of lists. It seems he passed away last month, but little notice was taken in the news media. Too bad. He did some memorable covers and no doubt attracted a lot of readers to paperbacks and digests. Certainly he was a favorite of mine.

More Fantastic 1954

Here's the back cover. Again, I like the ad, and two of the books pictured are two of the ones I bought when I joined the SF Book Club about this time: Omibus of Science Fiction and The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology. I still have them, and they're full of touchstone stories for me. No wonder. I was at the golden age for science fiction. None of the stories in this issue of Fantastic measure up to the ones in those two anthologies.

"The Murder-Con" by Jerome Bixby is the longest story in the issue. It's set at the 13th WorldCon. It name-checks a few SF writers and has a nice comment or two on cons, like this one: "'This science-fiction crowd can raise more hell, kill more bottles and drop more panties than bank night in le shack Sade.'" (I knew I should have started going to cons when I was a kid!) Not a great story, but smoothly told with alternating first-person viewpoints. It's about an awakening telepath and what must be done about him because he's Not A Nice Person. The illustration on the second page of the story depicts the ending, which I thought was too bad.

"The Outlaws" is an over-population story by Lee Priestley, whoever that is. Slick, condescending toward women (I wouldn't have noticed in 1954), and most notable for its casual mentions of wind farms, few of which must have been around in those days.

Got Your Costume Yet?

Link.

Forgotten Books: MURDER -- Harold Adams

Murder is the first book in Harold Adam's series about Carl Wilcox, an ex-con living, for the moment, in Corden, a small town in South Dakota during the Great Depression. I don't know how many books there were in the series, but one of them, The Man Who Was Taller than God, won a Shamus Award from the Private-Eye Writers of America.

Wilcox isn't a private-eye, however. He's a hobo and a sign-painter, but he always seems to be around some small town when a murder takes place. It's a good thing he's so good at solving crimes.

In Murder, Wilcox is fresh out of prison (armed robbery), and settling in back in his hometown. Before long, however there are three murders, and Wilcox decides that he'd better help solve them before the sheriff decides that an ex-con is just the man to take the blame.

The Wilcox novels are sold, old-fashioned entertainment. By that I mean they aren't flashy. They don't involve plots that affect the fate of the world. They're set in small towns and peopled with small-town characters. Wilcox likes women and booze, but he's trying to avoid the latter and go straight. He makes an engaging narrator as Adams talks about the way things used to be, when murder was personal and people weren't so very different from the way they are now, though the times certainly were. The next time you want to take a trip back to a simpler era, you could do a lot worse than to sample one of Adams' books.

The Brain from Planet Arous

Art Scott Accepts the Don Sandstrom Award at Bouchercon

Reed Farrel Coleman and Ken Bruen Interviewed

Reed Farrel Coleman and Ken Bruen Interviewed � BSCreview

Fantastic, October 1954

Since I've talked about a 1954 issue of Amazing, I thought it was only fair to say a few words about an issue of Fantastic from the same year. One thing is obvious: the Amazing had a much better cover. On the other hand, I have to admit that the guy in the middle of this one is making a truly bold fashion statement.

The cover illustrates "The Yellow Needle" by Gerald Vance. It's a time-travel fantasy, sort of an anti-Bradbuy -Finney story about a guy who travels back to 1900 and finds out he's not nearly as happy there as he'd thought he'd be. The yellow needle is the gimmick in the story, and what it has to do with a fakir in Cairo is something it's probably best not to think about. In fact, the whole story is something it's probably best not to think about. It's not very good at all.

The first story in the magazine is a science fiction tale by Milton Lesser. (The first story in the issue of Amazing was a fantasy by Lesser; go figure.) "Cosmic Appetite" can be summed up thusly: The Blob in outer space. Since it was written a good many years before The Blob hit the theaters, you might perhaps want to write a monograph on its influence. I don't.

Halloween's Coming!

Link.

Kiss Me, Deadly

Here's the Plot of Your Next Blockbuster SF Novel

Essay - The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate - NYTimes.com: "Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."