William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki stories are great fun, as are his other books. Carnacki is a kind of proto-ghostbuster meets Sherlock Holmes; he also wrote some great short story collections (The Voice in the Night is one of my earliest memories of reading in spec fiction, http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hodgson/william_hope/voice/).
Also, for a bit of a change, try Thorne Smith’s Nightlife of the Gods: it’s a fun little meringue about a scientist who invents a ray that turns flesh to stone, and back again - and then proceeds to liberate Greek gods from their statues in a museum. Very snappy dialogue, very PG Wodehouse.
When I was a kid, I had a book which contained three lesser-known stories by Jack London. I only remember one of them: The Scarlet Plague. It’s a kind of science-fictiony/Andromeda Strain kind of story, and I loved it. I lost the book, and for many years wanted to read this story again, but could never find it in a bookstore or library.
Then Project Gutenberg came along, and by George it’s there. I was finally able to read it again a couple of years ago, and it was just as good as I remember it. My husband loved it, too.
If you want strange and bizarre, take a look at The Gods of Pegāna, by Lord Dunsany. Inspired by Hindu mythology, it’s a very dark fantasy depicting a cosmos cruelly indifferent to humanity.
I find PG a wonderful time sink, I got lost in the Odyssey for several hours this morning, reading it and then comparing it to my audio book version.
I would seriously love it if every book published could be available online, it would be worth scrounging up an annual membership fee - I would pay up to $250 a year if I could have read online access to everything ever published.
Slow day at work yesterday, I sat and read this straight through. I rolled my eyes, I gagged, I laughed. But I also kinda grooved on it. “Interesting”, yes.
In addition to the** H. Beam Piper** books mentioned above I also found a lot of E. E Smith. I found all the Lensmen novels and the Skylark novels. I’m a big fan of Smith’s Paratime stories and they had everything except Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen.
I own all of the stories, but the paperbacks were getting pretty fragile.
That is why I have started scanning all of our paperbacks - they will in all likelyhood never be reprinted and I fear for their loss, there are so many hours of enjoyment from them in our memories.
If you like Lovecraft, try Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and Ghost Ship.
Stephen King named Machen as a major influence for some of his work, especially the short story N.
Not Project Gutenberg, but I found Karl Schroeder’s ‘Ventus’, as well as a large whack of Cory Doctrow’s books are listed as ‘Public Domain’ at FeedBooks.
This can’t be due to an expired copyright - both authors are still very much alive. I think it has more to do with the authors’ beliefs in open access copyright.
I recommend The Pencil of Nature by William Henry Fox Talbot. It’s essentially the first coffee table photography book, from 1844. I was going to visit Lacock Abbey this summer but the weather was consistently dire.
The impressive thing is that he basically got it right, first time. His advice on lighting portraiture is spot-on and still relevant today:
“With regard to many statues, however, a better effect is obtained by delineating them in cloudy weather than in sunshine. For, the sunshine causes such strong shadows as sometimes to confuse the subject. To prevent this, it is a good plan to hold a white cloth on one side of the statue at a little distance to reflect back the sun’s rays and cause a faint illumination of the parts which would otherwise be lost in shadow.”
That’s called fill-in light. I assume it was known to painters since time immemorial but this must have been the first time it was written about in the context of photography. Put another way, all the “how to take pictures” manuals since then have been more or less superfluous. Unfortunately the book was not a success, probably because Fox Talbot didn’t include any pictures of luxuriously lounging ladies.
See, I was conditioned by school and the mass media to assume that people from the past were idiots and evil. And yet the words in these old books - that people no longer read - show that some of our ancestors had an intelligence perhaps equal to our own.
“If we proceed to the City, and attempt to take a picture of the moving multitude, we fail, for in a small fraction of a second they change their positions so much, as to destroy the distinctness of the representation. But when a group of persons has been artistically arranged, and trained by a little practice to maintain an absolute immobility for a few seconds of time, very delightful pictures are easily obtained.”
