Rohmer, Sax (F. Paul Wilson, editor). A Little Yellow Book of Perilous Tales. Borderlands Press, 2024. First edition hardback, #463 of 500 copies signed by Wilson, a Fine copy, sans dust jacket, as issued. Short stories, including the very first Fu Manchu story ever published.
I will have a very small number of copies available in the next lame Excuse Books catalog (currently in progress).
This is an odd thing, because I don’t usually pick up first magazine appearances of stories for writers I collect, but this one was a gift from Dwight, who bought a copy for the G. K. Chesterton piece, and picked up an extra copy for me due to the Lansdale story (“it was as easy to pick up two copies as one”).
Strand Magazine, LXXIII 2024. First edition magazine original, 2024, a Fine copy. Contains the original Joe R. Lansdale story “Night Trails,” as well as a previously unpublished G. K. Chesterton essay on detective stories, plus work by Josh Malerman, John M. Floyd and Margie Deck, as well as interviews with James Patterson and Rupert Holmes.
Novik, Naomi. The Last Graduate. Del Rey, 2021. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket. “Lesson 2 of the Schoolomance.” Sequel to A Deadly Education. Bought for $12.59.
The third (and thus far final) book from that seller of Dark Harvest books on eBay.
Simmons, Dan. Carrion Comfort. Dark Harvest, 1989. First edition hardback, #303 of 400 signed, numbered copies, a Fine copy in a Fine- dust jacket a few touches of edgewear and a trace of rubbing to front spine join in a Fine slipcase. His celebrated novel of psychic vampirism. Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel. Chalker/Owings, page 121. Bought off eBay for $75.
Simmons published this, Hyperion and the underrated Phases of Gravity the same year, quite an impressive literary feat (though I’d already been following him from Song of Kali), and briefly enjoyed some “The Next Stephen King” collecting hype. But overproduction of some of Simmons work (particularly from Lord John Press) quickly proved that the market for Dan Simmons limited was not as large as the market for Stephen King limiteds. But Simmons still produces some fine work up to this day…
This is the second volume from that Dark Harvest sell-off on eBay.
Asimov, Isaac (Martin H. Greenberg, editor). The Asimov Chronicles: Fifty Years of Isaac Asimov. Dark Harvest, 1989. First edition hardback, #317 of 500 numbered copies signed by Asimov and illustrators Ron and Val Lakey Lindahn, a Fine copy in a Fine- dust jacket with touches of edgewear at points and a Fine- slipcase with with one thin 2″ scratch to rear. Career retrospective collection. Supplements a trade edition. Chalker/Owings, page 121. Bought off eBay for $75.
What’s more Halloween than an iconic horror movie directed by iconic director Stanley Kubrick from an iconic horror novel by Stephen King mocked by iconic Ryan George?
Honestly, I remember not being all that impressed with The Shining when I saw it back in the 1980s. A rewatch is probably overdue.
(And for fans of The Shining, this odd item might be of interest…)
Someone on eBay was selling off a bunch of Dark Harvest limiteds, and I picked up three of them for a comparative song. This is the first.
Lansdale, Joe R. The Nightrunners. Dark Harvest, 1987. First edition hardback, #60 of 300 numbered copies signed by Lansdale, introduction author Dean R. Koontz, and illustrator Gregory Manchess, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket and a Fine slipcase; a pristine, mint copy. Joe’s most splatterpunk work. Supplements both the lettered slipcrate edition and the trade edition I bought and had Joe sign back when it came out, so I now have all three states. Isajanko, A009.a.ii. Person/Orbaugh/Lansdale, “Joe Lansdale: Notes Toward a Bibliography,” 10a. Chalker/Owings, page 120 (Jack was not a fan of the novel). Bought off eBay for $75.
By way of coincidence, I will have a copy of the trade edition of The Nightrunners signed by both Lansdale and Koontz in the next Lame Excuse Books catalog.
How about a nice helping of existential dread for the Halloween season? But instead of worrying that you’re a fragile shell of decaying cells whose inevitable demise will terminate your brief, flickering existence in a howling void of meaningless nothingness, it’s the worry that neither you nor your too, too fragile husk is real at all, and that you’re just a string of 1s and 0s being run inside a computer.
Welcome to simulation theory!
“Would everything we see, everything we experience, everything that exists in our entire universe be artificial? Supporters of simulation theory believe that not only is it possible that we’re living in a simulation, it’s likely.”
“Modern simulation theory comes from Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford, who wrote an influential paper on the subject in 2003 assuming that living in a simulation is possible. Bostrom presents the simulation trilemma, which says one of the following must be true:
We destroy ourselves before we’re able to create a simulation.
We’re able to create a simulation, but choose not to. Or
We are definitely in a simulation.
Bostrom believes each of these is equally likely to be true.”
“When a civilization can create a realistic simulation, the most obvious one to create is that of its own early existence. Bostrom calls this an ancestral simulation, and a civilization that can do this wouldn’t just create one simulation, it would create many, and those simulated civilizations might create their own simulations of the universe, and on and on, like Russian nesting dolls of reality.”
Elon Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson both think it’s possible we’re living in a simulation.
“In that program, our program, all the laws of the universe, electromagnetism and gravitational force, are written into the program. The speed of light gets a value. There’s code for Planck’s constants of mass, speed, and time. Avogadro’s number is in there, along with a bunch of other rules that govern the behavior of everything that exists, all part of our program. Even consciousness itself is part of our simulation.”
Philip K. Dick “believed there are many universes, and sometimes those other realities bleed into ours. He claimed to have visions of this, and even wrote stories like The Man in the High Castle, based on these visions, that in fact plural realities did exist superimposed onto one another, like so many film transparencies.”
“One way other realities blend into ours could be The Mandela Effect. The Mandela Effect is when a large number of people have memories of events that don’t match reality. This is called The Mandela Effect because millions of people specifically remember Nelson Mandela died in prison. He didn’t. People remember his wife walking beside his casket in a funeral procession that was on television for two hours that day. This never happened.”
I’m snipping the other Mandela Effect examples, but I would swear that Jaws’ girlfriend actually had braces in Moonraker.
“Philip K. Dick also felt when we experienced deja vu is because something in our simulated universe changed and a new timeline branched off of the current one. We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed.”
“Ever feel like you’ve lived a moment before? That’s because, according to Philip K. Dick and others, you have. Deja vu is the simulation correcting itself with new information.”
It also explains the Drake Equation: “Are we really alone in the universe or does our program only focus on us?”
“Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at MIT, said the strict laws of physics point to the possibility of a simulation putting a cap on the speed of light. Sure is a good way to keep your sims from venturing out too far from home.”
Skipping over the “error correcting code in string theory equations” bit because string theory is garbage.
The deep embedding of math at every level of the universe argues in favor of simulation theory. “We see Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio everywhere.”
“No matter what we study, whether it’s something the size of a galaxy or as small as an electron, everything in the universe seems to follow patterns and rules. In other words, a program.”
The continued growth of computing power indicates how powerful computers in the future could run complex simulations.
While it’s said that you would need a computer the size of the universe to simulate the universe, that’s not true. Just as in modern simulations, you only need to render what someone is paying attention to at any given time.
The famous double slit experiment is evidence that the universe only renders things when we’re paying attention. “It’s as if the particles are aware they’re being observed.”
“Even though our universe is full of galaxies, those galaxies may not actually be there. If we’re living in a simulation, then stars and galaxies could simply be projections, and only when we get up close, those projections become more detailed. This is an excellent way to save computational resources. And because we’re stuck with a hard limit of the speed of light, getting to far-off places is really difficult.”
Personally, I think simulation theory is probably wrong for a meta-critique reason. All previous metaphorical understanding of the universe (as clockwork mechanism, as organism) have proven wrong, so this one is likely to be wrong as well…
