An editorial from ‘The Fort William Daily Times-Journal’, August 8, 1927

An interesting editorial from my hometown paper, circa 1927, just after a major socialist/communist riot/march in protest against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti: “There seems to be some surprise expressed over the fact that Miss Aurora D’Angelo, who led a mob of demonstrators in a riot over the Sacco-Vanzetti case, in Chicago, passed the [...]

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Herman Hesse, Demian

“The bird struggles out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born, must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is Abraxas.” These lines are what led me to Herman Hesse’s first major novel, Demian, subtitled The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth, published in 1919, [...]

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Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker

Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker is a novel about crisis. The Englishman narrator, his life seemingly at a crossroads, his moral and ethical beliefs in question in the first pages of the novel, is mysteriously disembodied. His consciousness embarks upon a fantastic journey across time, space and the entire Universe; you know, everything. As he journeys, [...]

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Stanislaw Lem…or Steven Soderbergh, Solaris

Why do you think it has to want something? if you think that there is a solution, you’ll die here …our enthusiasm’s a sham. We don’t want other worlds; we want mirrors I remembered her wrong Recently I have been reading Stanislaw Lem, I just finished his short novel The Invincible, and then the critical [...]

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Iain M. Banks, The Algebraist

“Swim” said Fassin. “You know; when your head kind of seems to swim because you suddenly think: “Hey, I’m a human being, but I’m twenty thousand light years from home and we’re all living in the midst of mad aliens and super weapons and the whole bizarre insane swirl of galactic history and politics! That; [...]

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