This is all rooted in a vision I had, of William S. Burroughs as a CIA agent, and Philip K. Dick as his young henchman, going head-to-head with notorious gangster and pervert Adolf Hitler somewhere in Hamburg to find out where Hitler is shipping all the computers he can get his hands on. - In another world Charles Stross wrote
this sprawling work of
Alternate History instead of the
Merchant Princes books. Fictional books are of course themselves a common them in Alternative History stories, from The Grasshopper Lies Heavy in
The Man in the High Castle to Adolf Hitlers pulp novel
Lord of the Swastika in
The Iron Dream. Stanisław Lem was particularly enamoured with the idea of the fictional book, and wrote two volumes of reviews and introductions for them, lovingly described
here by Bruce Sterling.
posted by Artw
on Sep 23, 2010 -
87 comments
Mythmaker of the Machine Age. In the statue erected above his grave in Amiens, in Picardy,
Jules Verne, who died exactly 100 years ago, resembles God. He is, after all, the second-
most-translated author on earth, after Agatha Christie.
To celebrate the anniversary, there's a Verne exhibition at the
Maritime Museum in Paris, one of a series of events from Paris to the western city of
Nantes, where Verne was born on Feb. 8, 1828, to the northern town of
Amiens, where he died on March 24, 1905. His many fans,
some of them quite famous, will be treated to exhibits, concerts, films and shows in Verne's honor. “
Underground City”, a lost classic written by Verne and never before published unabridged in English,
emerges this month in not one but two new unique editions.
100 years later, questions remain about his life: Why did he have two homes in Amiens? Why did he burn all his private papers? Why was he shot in the foot by his nephew, Gaston, in 1886? Gaston was locked in an asylum for 54 years after his attack on L'Oncle Jules. Was Gaston, in fact, Verne's natural son? More inside.
posted by matteo
on Mar 23, 2005 -
8 comments
A sad day for lovers of good writing. In addition to Stephen Jay Gould,
historian Walter Lord has died. (NYT, blah blah) Lord's 1955 book
A Night to Remember arguably touched off the modern world's fascination with the Titanic, and his 1957
Day of Infamy is an exciting account of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
posted by pmurray63
on May 20, 2002 -
6 comments
