Sweet Free Books October 10, 2014

Walking the Edge is a featured book in today's SweetFreeBooks!

Review - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013

The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition by Paula Guran
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The stories in this collection run the gamut from Neal Gaiman's The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury to Jim Butcher's hilarious Big Foot on Campus, touching on points in between. I won't even attempt to review every story here so I'll focus on what I consider to be the true gems in this collection.

The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury is a horror tale for our times. The narrator opens his tale with the line I am forgetting things, which scares me. With this simple sentence Gaiman takes us by the hand and leads us through the thoughts and fears of someone going through Alzheimer's or dementia, or maybe something else -- we are never really told -- but that's far from the point. Having your past wiped from your brain, memory by memory, is perhaps the scariest thing a person can face. Our past defines us, our memories make us who we are. If we lose those things where does that leave us? This story is no fantasy - what it describes is all too real, all too common, and that is what scares the crap out of me.

Big Foot On Campus - I don't want to give anything away here, so just let me say Harry Dresden is back and in fine form as his usual smart-alecky self.

Perhaps one of the creepiest tales in this collection is Robert Shearman's Bedtime Stories for Yasmin. There is nothing more innocuous than a story told to a child as she's being tucked into bed for the night, right? Not in this story. Enough said. You'll have to read it for yourself.

The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2013 lives up to it's title. Recommended.




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Walking the Edge on eBook Discovery

Walking the Edge
Eleven short horror and dark fantasy stories

Walking the Edge has been selected to appear in eBook Discovery's Action-Packed email this Friday, September 26th at 3:00 PM. Please feel free to subscribe here so you can see your favorite ebook shine!

Book Review - The Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses and Historians. by Cynthia C. Kelly
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Told through letters, reports, documents, and oral histories, this book takes us from the first sustained nuclear reaction under a squash court in Chicago all the way to the destruction of two cities and thousands of human beings. The story of the Manhattan Project is simultaneously exciting, riveting and heart wrenching. The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the only victims of the bomb; thousands of lives were consumed by this project, many were shattered, including perhaps the biggest hero of the story, J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Whatever your feelings about the bomb or nuclear energy The Manhattan Project is a fascinating read.

Recommended.


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Review: Eniac: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer

Eniac: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer by Scott McCartney
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The story of Eniac, the world's first truly programmable electronic computer, is both inspiring and heart breaking. J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly were true visionaries, ahead of their time in many ways, yet exactly in the right place at the right time in more ways. Their story is one of technological innovation and political in-fighting. Unfortunately for them victory, fame, and most of the money went to those who could play the game, leaving the creators of this world-changing machine under appreciated and, in Mauchly's case, broke.

Scott McCartney has written an engaging and well researched tale of creativity, invention, and betrayal.

Highly recommended.


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Starcrash

Starcrash 

1978

Caroline Munro, Marjoe Gortner, David Hasselhoff, Christopher Plummer

Oh my goodness, where to start?

First off, I love B movies. I love low budget films cobbled together by creative types with tiny budgets and nothing more than cardboard cut outs and blinking lights for special effects. Look at This Island Earth, It Came From Outer Space, The Beginning of the End. No big budgets here, but each of these films is packed with creativity and originality, concepts the makers of Starcrash were seemingly unfamiliar with. This is not a B movie, it's an F movie, and as much as I wanted to like it (Caroline Munro! What more does a movie need?) I found myself wanting to rip the director's arm off and beat him over the head with the bloody stump, shouting "Bad boy! No!"

Caroline Munro, trying her best to save this movie

Munro stars as Stella Star (no kidding); Marjoe Gortner as her psychic and seemingly immortal navigator, Akton; Christopher Plummer as the Emperor of the Universe; and David Hasselhoff (yeah, that David Hassellhof) as his son, Prince Simon. Munro is gorgeous but that's not nearly enough to save this mess. The real mystery is what the heck Christopher Plummer is doing here. Plummer seems embarrassed by the whole thing and it shows. Gortner, a former child evangelist turned bad actor, is so awful I couldn't look directly at him. Then there's the robot with the southern drawl. I won't get in that -- you'll just have to see it yourself.

Poor Christopher, we can see right through you

Gortner battling the vicious stop-action robots

Did you know?

The truly awful Marjoe Gortner and his robot pal

Stracrash was released in a hurry to cash in on the success of Star Wars. 

Christopher Plummer shot all of his scenes in one day. Like pulling a Band Aid off really fast, I guess.


The Star Wars rip off went so far as having Gortner swinging a light a pathetic toy light saber.

All the major actors dubbed their own voices back for the English version except for Munro. The producers didn't want to spend the money to have her fly in to do the work so Candy Clark did the work. Clark was married to Gortner at the time.

Gorgeous Caroline Munro is the daughter of the equally gorgeous Janet Munro (The Day the Earth Caught Fire, The Crawling Eye aka The Trollenberg Terror).

Marjoe Gortner, at four years old, was proclaimed "The world's youngest ordained minister."

The Hoff as Prince Simon

Starcrash is on the You Tube. You can see it here. Please don't buy it, watch it for free if you really feel you must. But be warned, this movie will change you, and not in a good way.

The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul

Douglas Adams

Enter the slightly off kilter world of Douglas Adams' London, where Norse gods run amok in the streets while Dirk Gently, a holistic detective who believes in the quantum interconnectedness of all things, tries to unravel the murder of a successful record producer, beheaded by a green demon from Valhalla.

Sound confusing? Welcome to the creative genius of Douglas Adams. Everyone knows Douglas for his brilliant Hitchhiker's trilogy (all four of them) but the Dirk Gently books are just as wildly imaginative. 

If you haven't had the pleasure of Mr. Gently's acquaintance go to your local book store right now and get them all. Go on! What are you waiting for?