 Alright it's time for the October 2014 roundup. Not much to cover as far as new books haven't acquired very much. Let me get to some comments and questions out of the way first. Number one, go to the tumblr, 30secondsci-fi.tumblr.com. There's a link in the description. There's a lot more stuff at the tumblr than there is just here on YouTube. I always post pictures of stuff when I acquire at books, DVDs, whatever. This month I've also been posting lists of links to videos, science fiction short films. I posted some horror short films. I posted a list of science short science videos this week. I'll be doing more of that in the future. Also on the tumblr, a couple of weeks ago, I posted a link to a huge trove of science fiction audiobooks that I found on YouTube. I listened to a number of the short stories myself and I've discovered that they come from a public domain collection called LibriVox, which are read by volunteers. So keep in mind that these are amateur productions. You'll hear a lot of mispronounced words, a lot of names mispronounced, but there you go. Anyway, lots of good free stuff there. The YouTube commenting system is a mess. I'm sure that everybody who's been using YouTube up to this point knows that. It's just a mess. I don't necessarily know when new comments have been left on the videos. Sometimes I can't reply to comments that are left. The whole thing is just a mess, but again I'm sure I don't have to explain that. The only thing that's worse is the commenting system on daily motion. There basically is no commenting system. You can leave a comment on a video, but as far as the creator, the video creator, there's no way at all to reply to a comment. None. Daily motion has been having problems. More problems than usual recently. For the longest time I thought they would be a good alternative to YouTube. They're okay for a backup, I guess, but they actually lost a number of videos from before this year. Anyway, I like that jukebox that I have at the top of the Tumblr page. I asked last time for someone to tell me if the jukebox works for you. I didn't get any response to that. Somebody please go to the Tumblr on your desktop computer, not on your handheld because it won't show up on your handheld, but at the top of the Tumblr page there's a video jukebox that has all of the book reviews going all the way back to number one, at least the ones that Daily Motion hasn't lost. Tell me if the jukebox works. Somebody. All right, here. I picked this up just today at the Dollar Store, DVD double feature. Panic in the Year Zero, starring Ray Milland and Frankie Avalon of all people. I've never heard of it. Evidently it's an atomic attack film and it was released just before the Cuban Missile Crisis, so I imagine it scared the hell out of people. Vincent Price, Last Man on Earth. I have seen this movie. It's an adaptation of I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. It's much more faithful to the book than the more recent Will Smith version. I'm ashamed to say I've not read the book. Richard Matheson, by the way, is one of the most respected science fiction authors of the 20th century. He wrote a lot of television screenplays. He was very instrumental in the success of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone series. If you've never watched Twilight Zone, by the way, watch Twilight Zone. Next time there's a Twilight Zone marathon on on television where the sci-fi channel or or Turner classics or whoever does those things, turn it on. Turn on the TV and leave it running for the whole weekend for for all five or six seasons to run. You'll be astonished at how good that show is. Even compared to its contemporaries like Boris Karloff's thriller and Outer Limits, it's much better. It's head and shoulders above all of those. Now get these out of the way. I posted this on the Tumblr. I found this, this was at Publix. This was in the clearance box at Publix. Three dollars. This giant hardback book. Three dollars. It has illustrations and everything. There's a beautiful shiny finish on here. It's called Ink Death by Cornelia Funk. Never heard of it. Don't know what it is. Apparently it's part of the Ink Heart series. Maybe I'll read it sometime. In the same box was this Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter The Long War. This is a sequel to some other book. I like Stephen Baxter sometimes. I've never read any Terry Pratchett. I take that back. I'm pretty sure I'm almost, I'm almost entirely sure that I read Good Omens that Terry Pratchett co-wrote with Neil Gaiman. Am I getting that right? Was that Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Good Omens? I remember that I must have read it. I don't remember a single thing about it. It obviously didn't leave an impression on me but maybe I'll read this sometime. Okay pick this up this week at my favorite local bookstore. Retief at Large by Keith Lammer. I've talked about Keith Lammer before. I read him for the first time a few years ago. I really enjoyed his style. This is a collection. Looks like it's a collection of short stories starring this character Retief. I don't know anything about this character. God I can't see this glare. There's glare on everything. I don't know anything about this character but I'm really looking forward to reading these short stories. Okay I started reading this in McCaffrey's Dragon Flight. I read about a quarter of it. I'll be reviewing it soon. I just wanted to say that I'm impressed with it. I can see why it's been so popular over the decades. I can also see why they've never made a movie out of it. It's all dragons. It's going to be real hard. The reason I got this is because I read that someone is finally determined to make a blockbuster Hollywood film out of it. If they do it right this will be a hell of a movie. From what I've read so far I like it. Evidently there's an awful lot of these Dragon Rider books. Now here they are here. Yeah there's a lot of them. There's illustrations too. This was published in 1968 which surprises me. It's almost as old as me. Same time I got the Retief book I picked this up. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I'm not going to use the other name because that's not the name of the book. I asked the guy at the store do you have a copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and he said I do just got it in. I'm afraid he's got the other name on it so he feels the way I do. And this goes back to a comment I got on one of my videos a while back when when I mentioned this movie and I said that putting the name of somebody else's book on a movie is the dumbest thing a director can do. The reason I used that particular phrase at that time was because I was just improvising. I didn't have anything in particular in mind. Actually I would revise that to say it's the shittiest thing a director can do. I will double down on that. For Ridley Scott or any director to make a movie out of somebody's book and then put the name of somebody else's book on the title of the movie displays just hatred if you ask me contempt for the material contempt. The name Blade Runner belongs on somebody else's book I can't think of his name right now but it's a it's a story about a guy who who runs human organs on a black market for illegal surgeries. So the word blade actually means something and the word runner actually means something to the title of that book. This has no relation at all to Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. None whatsoever. Anyway the reason I picked this up was because the folks at Sword and Laser announced that they're going to be reading this book for this month and I'd never read it. I've read plenty of Philip K. Dick but I've always read his short stories. I read the first two chapters here and it is nothing at all like the movie. Nothing. An actual electric sheep showed up on page two maybe even page one. Deckard and his wife his wife is there they live in a building they own a literal electric sheep that lives on the roof and pretends to graze on a fake lawn on the roof. It's a prestige item. Evidently people in this future owning living animals is a luxury and people like to show it off and people who can't afford living animals they buy electric animals for fake prestige like a fake Rolex. The world that I've seen in the first two chapters of this book looks nothing at all like that movie. I do not like the movie by the way if you haven't figured that out I think it's a terrible movie. I know I'm in the minority. I've never understood why people like that movie so much. I think it's a bad movie. I think it's boring and that's about it. It's just boring. But again I've read plenty of Philip K. Dick. I don't think I have to tell you that the movie Total Recall was based on a story he wrote called We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. That particular story is very short and it's basically a joke. Most of Philip K. Dick's short stories are indeed very short and most of them are just like our jokes. They're social humor, satire, political satire and science fiction as well. But in particular We Can Remember It For You Wholesale is a joke. It's a silly story. In order to make a serious action film out of it some people consider it satire. I think it's a terrible movie. It's so bad I can't watch it. But it bears no resemblance at all to the story like this. And then there's the adjustment bureau that came out a few years ago. Again a terrible movie based on a very short Philip K. Dick story that was basically a joke. Just a silly story intended to to elicit laughs and making fun of science fiction basically. And I gotta tell you if you saw the adjustment bureau if you remember all the problems started when this this one agent a black guy wearing a trench coat and a hat he fell asleep when he was supposed to be watching the the protagonist to make sure he didn't get off a bus or something like that. In the story that character was a dog. That should give you some idea of that they're starting so differently that there's no point hardly and even considering it a Philip K. Dick story. I said with very bad grammar just then. All right one last thing. I showed this on the tumbler. This came from a an indiegogo that I contributed to. It's a big book big heavy book. It's a collection of war stories with Cthulhu mythos as their basis. This is a heavy book. There's a lot of illustrations. I have not read any of it yet. It was recommended by the guys at the HPpodcraft.com. It wasn't expensive so you know so I paid to get a book. I have to say the one thing I have to say about is I think the art on the cover isn't very good. It looks amateurs to me. It looks like a fan art that you find on deviant art. And I feel the same way about the art in the interior. There are full color plates for every story. All of the interior art is done by one guy. And I'm not terribly impressed with it. There's a lot of detail, a lot of color, but that doesn't make good art. The anatomy is stiff. The faces are flat and expressionless. Again it looks like amateur stuff. What I want to say to the publishers of this book, the editor's names are on the cover and on the frontist piece. I don't see the name of the cover artist or the interior artist on the cover or the frontist piece or the table of contents. I had to find them in the copyrights. Cover image copyright Vincent Chong. Interior images copyright M. Wayne Miller. That's bad form guys. With a book like this where the art is so prevalent. Put the artist's name on the book. Put it on the cover. Put it on the frontist piece. Put it on the table of contents. That's bad form. Okay that's it. I would like to do collaborations with people who have read some of the books that I've reviewed other YouTubers who have read some of the books that I've reviewed and we can spend some time talking about the books. If anyone wants to do that leave messages and let me know. And again I want to be expanding the stuff that I do here on this channel. Hopefully before the end of the year I can start doing some of these board games. I can get people together and actually make some board game videos. So I'll see you then. Bye.