Imagine that you’re a well-off Chinese businessman who lives in a posh condo in Beijing.
Now imagine that you start seeing people in your building who are decidedly un-posh, people who actually seem to be quite poor, but somehow they’re living in your building.
Still more from the Bob Pylant purchase, including two more Zelaznys that I thought I didn’t need, but it turns out I did.
Bass, T. J. The Godwhale. Eyre Methuen, 1974. First hardback edition (the Ballantine PBO precedes) and first UK edition, a Fine copy save some very sight age darkening to pages, in a Fine dust jacket. Sequel to Half Past Human and a Nebula Award finalist. Currey, page 25.
Moorcock, Michael. The Hollow Lands. Harper & Row, 1974. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Near Fine, price-clipped dust jacket. Signed twice by Moorcock, on the half title and title pages. Second volume of the Dancers at the End of Time trilogy. Tanelorn Archives, page 21. Currey, page 370.
Pohl, Frederick, Martin Harry Greenberg and Joseph Olander, editors. Worlds of if: A Retrospective Anthology. Bluejay Books, 1986. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket. Reprint collection of stories that originally appeared in If magazine. Includes Zelazny’s “This Mortal Mountain.” A couple of points of interest: First, all the stories whose authors were still alive provided short, original “Memoirs” to their stories, including ones from Zelazny, Lafferty, Ellison, etc., and I believe the vast majority of these have never been reprinted anywhere else. Second, this book came out from Bluejay Books in September of 1986, which means it was among the very last block of books published before their implosion, along with Rob Swigart’s Vector and Vernor Vinge’s Marooned in Realtime.
Zelazny, Roger. Eye of Cat. Timescape, 1982. First edition proof, a Fine copy. Thought I had bought another Eye of Cat proof from Bob in an earlier purchase, but no. Timescape was another imprint that ceased business in the 1980s.
Zelazny, Roger. Unicorn Variations. Timescape, 1983. First edition hardback, a Near Fine copy with the Simon & Schuster “walking man” remainder mark at heel in a Fine- dust jacket with a trace of soiling to the white jacket. I thought I had a signed first, but not, I have a signed book club, and a Fine unsigned first, but not a signed first.
Many of the must-have homeowner amenities considered an essential feature are no longer to be found on modern homes. No longer are buildings including such once-essential features as coal cellars, lightning rods, fallout shelters or murder tunnels.
And remember: A murder tunnel is completely different than a corpse hatch.
Here, then, is what I was able to note immediately after the decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds … I waited for several seconds. The spasmodic movements ceased.The face relaxed, the lids half closed on the eyeballs, leaving only the white of the conjunctiva visible, exactly as in the dying whom we have occasion to see every day in the exercise of our profession, or as in those just dead.It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: ‘Languille!’ I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions … Next Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves … After several seconds, the eyelids closed again, slowly and evenly, and the head took on the same appearance as it had had before I called out.It was at that point that I called out again and, once more, without any spasm, slowly, the eyelids lifted and undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids, but now less complete. I attempted the effect of a third call; there was no further movement and the eyes took on the glazed look which they have in the dead.
Snip.
My friend’s head came to rest face up, and (from my angle) upside-down. As I watched, his mouth opened and closed no less than two times. The facial expressions he displayed were first of shock or confusion, followed by terror or grief. I cannot exaggerate and say that he was looking all around, but he did display ocular movement in that his eyes moved from me, to his body, and back to me. He had direct eye contact with me when his eyes took on a hazy, absent expression . . . and he was dead.
“It is very possible that a head so removed may remain lucid long enough to know its fate.”
Yokai is a very broad category of Japanese supernatural entity that can include demons, ghosts, monsters, and just about any other creature from folklore, from microscopic monsters than infect your spleen to dragon-sized titanic snails. Many, but not all, are malevolent, and a goodly number are extremely specific, such as Karakasa kozo, the one-eyed, umbrella-shaped yokai that likes to sneak up on people and lick them with its long tongue.
Here’s a brief guide on identifying various yokai:
There’s also a live-action film featuring 100 of them:
Back on Halloween in 1992, the BBC played a trick on its viewers by broadcasting a program called Ghostwatch. It was an early example of what we would call “Reality TV,” and like the overwhelming majority of Reality TV shows, it was fake.
It was supposedly a BBC camera crew staking out a home where poltergeist was said to be active. In fact, it was a scripted event where viewers intentionally caught glimpses of the malevolent ghost “Pipes” in the background while he was ignored by the cast, with planted on-air callers to the studio adding to the story, and during the course of the broadcast things got progressively weirder.
Like Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast, there were disclaimers that it was fiction, but the form in which in which it was presented (with real-world TV personalities like Red Dwarf‘s Craig Charles and presenter Michael Parkinson) convinced viewers they were watching the real thing.
Five days after the programme’s transmission, an 18-year-old boy with learning difficulties, Martin Denham, hanged himself, having fallen into what his stepfather described as a trance. He had become obsessed with Ghostwatch and was convinced that there were ghosts in the water pipes of his Nottingham home.
In November 1993, a year after the programme’s one-off airing, two doctors from a child psychiatry unit in Coventry, Dawn Simons and Walter Silveira, submitted an article to the British Medical Journal (BMJ) recording the first cases of post-traumatic stress disorder caused by a television programme. Two ten-year-old boys had been referred to them. One was admitted to an inpatients unit for eight weeks; he would bang his head in an attempt to free himself from thoughts of Ghostwatch and its evil spirit, “Pipes”.
Consultants from Edinburgh came forward with four more children with similar symptoms. Martin Denham’s parents launched an inquiry into their son’s death. In 2002, his mother condemned the BFI’s DVD release of Ghostwatch, saying the programme had killed her son.
The show’s producers, Ruth Baumgarten and Richard Broke, were hauled on to BBC One’s consumer watchdog show Biteback to defend themselves.
Here’s a retrospective video on it:
And here’s writer Stephen Volk on creating it:
Today, of course, fake paranormal reality TV shows have proliferated so far and wide that you can rank over 60 of them and see them parodied on South Park:
While no one was looking, a whole bunch of Austin restaurants closed:
BRIO Tuscan Grille: Pricey Italian chain location in the Arboretum. Good food, but I only ate there on the very occasional Sunday (when Reale’s is closed).
Blue Baker: Another Arboretum closure. More bakery with a sidelight in sandwiches. I really hated the design of their space.
Brick Oven: Longtime Austin pizza restaurant at Braker and 183 is closing because that center’s HEB wants to expand into the space. I never liked their crust.
Bombay Bistro North: Same center, possibly the same reason, but they seem to have closed before now. Pretty decent Indian food,
Third Base Northwest: Sports bar on 183 that served pub grub; seems to have closed sometime in the last 10 months or so.
There are a lot of Austin restaurant closures that aren’t getting covered by Eater or the Statesman because they aren’t downtown and/or hipster-frequented joints. I only noticed these because I discovered that two of the three restaurant pad sites near the Arboretum had no labels on them in Google maps.
Non-Zelazny (mostly) hardbacks from my most recent Bob Pylant purchase.
de Camp, L. Sprague. Warlocks and Warriors. Putnam, 1970. First edition hardback, a Fine- copy with five tiny ink “x”s next to stories on the copyright page and a trace of bend at head and heel, in a Fine- dust jacket with traces of edgewear along flap folds. Signed by de Camp. Includes Zelazny’s “The Bells of Shoredan.” The Zelazny and others include maps for their stories that I’m not sure I’ve seen anywhere else.
Greenberg, Martin H. Dragons: The Greatest Stories. MJF Books, 1997. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket. Anthology. A few mysteries about this copy: Has a numberline ending in one (which would typically indicate a first edition rather than a book club edition), but no price on the dust jacket (which would typically indicate the opposite), and has a red binding along the spine. The ISFDB lists two editions, one at a price of $19.95, and the other at a price of $7.98, the latter of which it indicates is taken from the Locus database, which also lists only one edition of the book and that as an instant remainder (which would explain the lack of a price). The Don Maitz cover appears to be a cropped example of the fuller dust jacket illustration that originally appeared on Kathleen Sky’s Witchdame in 1985; copies of this anthology with green spine and the fuller illustration (still with no price on the dust jacket) appear to be second printings. Still another mystery is the not-quite-right Zelazny signatures on the title page and at his story “The George Business,” which would be a neat trick since Zelazny died in 1995. No idea if Bob or someone else created the spurious signatures. It would seem that this instant remainder edition was done first and the pricier retail edition (if it even exists) may have been done later.
Ipcar, Dahlov. A Dark Horn Blowing. Viking Press, 1978. First edition hardback, a near Fine copy with slight bend at head and heel, a short, thin line of rust-colored staining at very bottom of front free endpaper, and a trace of age-darkening to pages, in a Near Fine dust jacket with a vertical crease running along the edge of the rear flap. Fantasy novel of a woman kidnapped to elfland to nurse a newborn elf prince. Never heard of it, but Bob said it was a good novel. In the Encyclopedia of fantasy, John Clute calls her work “atmospheric and densely conceived.”
Lee, Tanith. Sometimes, After Sunset. Nelson Doubleday/SFBC, 1980. First edition hardback, an omnibus edition of Sabella, or The Blood Stone and Kill the Dead (neither of which had any other hardback editions), a Fine copy in a Near Fine+ dust jacket with slight wear at points, a thin 1/2″ scratch at top front spine join, a trace of rubbing along front flap join bend edge, and slight age darkening to white flaps. Nice early Maitz cover.
Le Guin, Ursula K., editor. Nebula Award Stories 11. Gollancz, 1976. First edition hardback (precedes the U.S. edition by a year), a Fine- copy with slight bend at head and heel, traces of foxing to front free endpaper, and slight dust soiling at head, in a Near Fine copy with spine fading and a trace of edgewear at points. Includes the Nebula-winning Zelazny novella “Home is the Hangman.”
Meacham, Beth. Terry’s Universe. Tor, 1988. Uncorrected bound proof (trade paperback format) of the hardback first edition, a Fine copy. Tribute anthology to the late Terry Carr. Includes Zelazny’s “Deadstone Donner and the Flintstone Cup.”
Schiff, Stuart David, editor. The Best of Whispers. Borderlands Press, 1994. First edition hardback, #375 of 500 signed, numbered copies, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket and a Fine slipcase. Signed by all the then-living contributors (Fritz Leiber died in 1992), including Zelazny, Ray Bradbury, Karl Edward Wagner, Russell Kirk, Hugh B. Cave, Lucius Shepard, Jerry Sohl and Alan Ryan. Includes Zelazny’s “The Horses of Lir.”
A perennial Mystery Science Theater 3000 favorite, Space Mutiny is a grade Z science fiction film feature bad acting, a bad script, bad direction, ludicrous sets, thoroughly incompetent continuity, and special effects licensed from the original Battlestar Galactica TV series.
Here the people behind The Bad Movie Bible (which I may need to pick up) take a look at the story behind the film:
I didn’t realize that ostensible director David Winters was also the choreographer for The Star Wars Holiday Special. While that’s an awful lot of evil to pack into one career, any teenage boy whose parents had The Movie Channel in the 1980s are certainly willing to forgive a lot of sins for producing late night “classic” Young Lady Chatterly. (In the “non-evil” department, he was also a Jet in West Side Story.)
The MST3K episode of Space Mutiny is available as part of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Vol. 4. BLAST HARDCHEESE says you should pick up a copy…
