Literary Recon into the Wilderness of Books
I’m leaving Punktown with this one. There is at least one more Punktown collection, Voices from Punktown, I need to get. I do have the Punktown anthology Transmissions from Punktown and another Punktown story in a magazine, but I have no plans to read them right way. Low Res Scan: Flesh for Punktown, Jeffrey Thomas, [ ]
Essay: Commune 2000 A.D., Mack Reynolds, 1974. The parallax on this is provided by MPorcius Fiction Log, and I rather agree with him charactering this novel as “tepid”. Or, at least, I would have before skimming it again to make my notes about three months after reading it. I finished it the same day as [ ]
Oh, I’m not done with Mack Reynolds by a long shot. (To regular readers: grinding your teeth is bad for you.) Essay: “The Towns Must Roll”, Mack Reynolds, 1969. Reynolds’ Bat Hardin series is a loosely jointed and spread across a magazine and two paperback publishers. The individual books weren’t marketed as a series. The [ ]
Review: Nights in Punktown, Jeffrey Thomas, 2019. Punktown is a “city of ceaseless and prodigious appetite”. And technology and alien flesh is there to satisfy some of those appetites. Is love just a “good, hard orgasm”? That’s the question the emibittered Isabella asks in “Draped in Flesh”. In the chapbook’s sole original story, it’s the [ ]
Under his Forma Street Press (Forma Street’s a neighborhood in Punktown), Jeffrey Thomas has been reprinting some of his work including several chapbooks of Punktown stories. Review: Welcome to Punktown, Jeffrey Thomas, 2021. Vera D’Cruz is surrounded by xenophilia. Her ex-husband Dario seems to like dating aliens. And everybody seems to love the “Vertices”. They’re [ ]
With this I’ll have read four of the primary sources on the Upper Missouri fur trade. Review: Twilight of the Upper Missouri River Fur Trade: The Journals of Henry A. Boller, ed. and with introduction by W. Raymond Wood, 2008. Boller brings something new to the primary accounts of the Upper Missouri trade in furs: [ ]
This isn’t the subject of this month’s weird fiction discussion over at LibraryThing. It’s June’s. But, when I ordered a book that had it, the order never came, and it was only a lucky find in a second hand bookstore that allowed me to find it. Review: “Kiss Me Again, Stranger”, Daphne Du Maurier, 1952. [ ]
Review: Punktown: Shades of Grey, Jeffrey Thomas and Scott Thomas, 2005, 2022. We’re back in Punktown. Keep your windows closed and observe the sights from a safe distance. This anthology is broken into two parts, each part collecting stories from one of the Thomas brothers. So, let’s start with the creator of Punktown, Jeffrey Thomas. [ ]
I won’t promise this is a return to regular levels of posting, but I’m going to take you to Punktown again. Review: Punktown, Jeffrey Thomas, 2000, 2018. Following a brief appreciation of the world of Punktown by Michael Marshall Smith’s “Introduction”, Thomas tells a bit about the place in “A Brief History of the City: [ ]
It’s this month’s weird fiction being discussed over at LibraryThing. I finally got my hands on last month’s selection, so I’ll be covering that eventually too. Review: “Metastasis”, Dan Simmons, 1988. Mathematician Louis Steig, a resident of Denver, rushes to visit his mother, just hospitalized for advanced breast cancer according to his sister Lee. Louis [ ]