Raritania
Monday, March 7, 2022
Joker
and the Cult of Intelligence
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I remember being struck by the intensity of the moral panic that surrounded the release of Todd Phillips' The Joker back in October 201...
Remembering Angus Calder's
The People's War
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For as long as I can remember the narrative about World War II prevailing in the United States (which received a massive boost in the late &...
Sunday, March 6, 2022
Steve Shagan’s
The Formula
and the Future of the Coal Industry
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It seems the name Steve Shagan is not much heard these days, but once upon a time he was fairly prominent as both a novelist and a screenwri...
Do Bad Reviews Have More Impact Than Good Ones?
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One of those bits of unexplained, unsubstantiated bits of Internet "wisdom" I have run across holds that where books are concerned...
The Unevenness of Technological Development, and the Vision of RethinkX
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Amid the steady analytical output from the RethinkX think tank the principal document tying the implications of their studies of energy, tra...
Review:
The Aquitaine Progression
, by Robert Ludlum
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In its premise The Aquitaine Progression is consistent with the familiar Ludlum formula. (An American East Coast bourgeois in Europe finds ...
Review:
The Parsifal Mosaic
, by Robert Ludlum
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Coming right after The Bourne Identity The Parsifal Mosaic seems to significantly follow that book’s pattern, opening with a scene of viol...
Review:
The Holcroft Covenant
, by Robert Ludlum
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Reading my way through other long sequences of books by popular authors I have often noted that they often produce a number of fairly varied...
Sunday, February 27, 2022
The Enlargement of the German Defense Budget: What Does it Mean?
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In recent years I have generally refrained from attempting to offer comment on immediate events, especially in a news-y sort of way--my rese...
Thursday, February 24, 2022
The Half-Life of the Interest of Popular Fiction
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I recall seeing a data set which showed that of some 60 million copies of works of fiction sold in the first half of 2018, some 3.6 million ...
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Wednesday, February 23, 2022
Is Bad Sci-Fi Holding Technological Progress Back?
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Ordinarily we hear about how science fiction has encouraged technological progress--how science fiction writers set forth ideas long before ...
Tuesday, February 22, 2022
Review:
Trevayne
, by Robert Ludlum
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In reading my way through Robert Ludlum's canon I was particularly late in coming to Trevayne . This was in part because it is one of hi...
Thursday, February 10, 2022
Review:
The Gemini Contenders
, by Robert Ludlum
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Robert Ludlum has more than once incorporated an element of family epic into his books, particularly his World War II-themed work, as with T...
Tuesday, February 1, 2022
Review:
The Matlock Paper
, by Robert Ludlum
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WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD In Robert Ludlum's third novel, 1973's The Matlock Paper , the FBI, looking to identify the leader of a p...
Friday, January 28, 2022
Announcing . . .
The Secret History of Science Fiction
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Back in 2015 I published a history of science fiction-- Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry --tracing what we commonly discuss as the "ma...
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