 It's time to talk about the acquisitions and the new reading that I did in August. Before I get started on that though, let me talk about what little bit of feedback I've gotten. Like I said before, my views on my YouTube channel are very small numbers, but they're growing. They're more than I've gotten in the past. I mean look at the videos that I posted last week. They're getting up into like 14 and 15. Usually a week after posting my videos, the numbers are still at zero. In addition to being on YouTube, I also post them on daily motion and on Vimeo. On those sites, the view counts are zero. I think daily motion has a lot going for it. Primarily it's not owned by Google. There's a Tumblr, if you hadn't noticed. It's a 30-second sci-fi.tumblr.com and there's a Twitter account to go with it. If you follow the Tumblr and please do, the videos are posted on the Tumblr when I publish them and I'm also posting photographs of every new book that comes in. There's a lot more stuff on the Tumblr than there is on YouTube or Daily Motion or Vimeo. PacBilly asks basically three questions. No, I'm not interested in getting into the publishing business and as you surmised, that would involve doing very large amounts of reading bad writing, which I have no interest in doing. PacBilly also asks why I don't have an e-reader. I do have an e-reader or I have had e-readers in the past. I had a Galaxy Tab a year ago. I owned it for about a year. I did some e-reading on it. I found it visually uncomfortable. I had bought the Galaxy Tab thinking that I would do a lot of e-reading on it, but what happened was I ended up laying in bed watching YouTube all night going back and forth between YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook all night. I basically went a whole year without doing any reading at all. I also went a whole year without sleeping and I'm not joking. Again, PacBilly, why my videos have such a low viewership? Well, I'm an unknown. I'm nobody. I think that's the answer right there. The one 30-second book review that has a lot of views is my first one, the review of Hyperion. It has something like 1500 views, which is way out of proportion with all the others. The reason is because I made that video specifically for the Sword and Laser podcast. I don't think they used it because I had a lot of interesting things to say about Hyperion. I think they used it because they were laughing at me. The reason these are getting such a low viewership is because I'm just nobody. I mean, come on. Just in the last month, there's more of a viewership, so I guess I'll just keep it up. I'm not going to be doing three a week anymore. That was too much. You should always look for independently owned bookstores in your neighborhood. I guarantee you, whatever neighborhood you live in, there will be one. I guarantee it. I don't know what it's like in other countries, but I suspect it's the same as it is here in the United States. There are used books literally everywhere, literally everywhere. There will be little independent used bookstores hidden between other stores in a strip mall, or maybe just in the corner of the back of a laundromat, somebody selling a wall full of used books that you haven't suspected or seen before. You have to look for them. I guarantee you, everybody who's seeing this, there will be a place to browse through stacks and stacks of used books that's very close by, maybe even walking distance. You just have to look. eBay, of all things, has turned out to be a very valuable resource for used books. I bought most of what you're seeing here on this table from eBay. Alibris is exclusively for books. You can get DVDs there now. The buying process at Alibris is a lot like Amazon, but the value of Alibris number one is that it's not Amazon. And then there's this. I've got this one other thing. I get around on a bicycle. I'll go a few blocks away for lunch several times a week, and I'll toss one of these books into the basket on the back of my bicycle. And these old books, they'll get beat up or even more beat up than they even are. And I've had a couple of times, my bookmark will fly off into the street somewhere. So I wanted to find some kind of book cover, a book carrying case. And when I looked for stuff like that online, all I was finding was these fancy specialized Bible zip cases, which that's not what I wanted. But this is an iPad case. And I found it at the grocery store. I found it at Publix. I really like this. I'm using it every single day. Okay, books. These are the things that I've been posting on Tumblr as they've been coming in. Alpha Centauri or Die by Lee Brackett. The guy at the, I bought this at the local bookstore, the guy there told me that Lee Brackett was, I don't think I've ever read Lee Brackett, by the way, but he told me that she was screenwriter. And the last movie screenplay that she wrote was Empire Strikes Back. I did not know that. A three in one book, Theodore Sturgeon, Clifford Simac, Murray Lindster. First story on there is called The Sickness. Fritz Lieber. I bought this at the local bookstore. Fritz Lieber. I'm not sure how to pronounce it. A Pale of Air. Look at this cover. This is a collection I hadn't seen before. And the title story, A Pale of Air, was a story I hadn't heard of. One of the damnedest things I've ever read. It's about a distant future earth where the planet earth has flown off into an interstellar space, and the atmosphere has frozen. And people who have managed to survive under all the nitrogen ice literally have to go up to the surface to fetch pails of oxygen. I'm sure he doesn't have his physics quite right, but it's some of the most vivid ideas that I've ever read. Mind Pool, a Charles Sheffield. I read this in the 90s sometime. I'm going to read it again. Arthur C. Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001. Evidently, this is a collection of stories by Arthur C. Clarke that this looks like a lot of these chapters, actually nonfiction, about the making and the writing of the... Well, we'll see. A bunch of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The land that time forgot, the people that time forgot, Escape on Venus, Fighting Man of Mars. This is, I think, Book 8 in the John Carter series. This I bought from eBay or Libris, I don't remember. This is The Gods of Mars and The Warlords of Mars. These are books two and three in the series, and I'm really excited about getting started on this. It's got the Frasetta covers. I didn't want to have to buy a book, a collection like this that included the first book, which I'd already read, and here it was, books two and three together. I can only think that the editors who published this were thinking the same thing. They were thinking that people are going to read book one and they're going to go looking for books two and three. They were smart. This is something interesting. I found these on eBay. Two gigantic hardback collections of classic science fiction edited by Anthony Boucher, published in 1959. I'll tell you why I looked these up, and I learned about these, and then I looked for them on eBay, and there they were immediately, both of them, for very little money, very little. That's the thing about eBay and Libris. People have books, piles and piles of books, and they want to get rid of them. I learned about those collections in this volume here. Marion Zimmer Bradley is an author that I'm never going to review. I'm never going to cover her material. Look her up on Wikipedia and you'll see why. But I was thumbing through this, and I saw this old fold-out advert for this two-volume set of the great collection of science fiction, for a dime. It's got one of these clever little folding things. You put your dime here, fold the thing, put in your address, and mail it. Here's a picture of the books here. It just made me think, I wonder if anybody has this. I wonder if anybody's selling this. There they were, immediately found them for almost nothing. There were multiple people selling this two-volume collection. This is a very interesting thing that I got from Libris. I'm very interested in getting into this gnarl by Rudy Rucker. I was introduced to Rudy Rucker by chance. I found this funny little science book called The Fourth Dimension by a guy named Rudy Rucker. It was very entertaining. I may talk about that book someday. But he's also a fiction writer. I've read a couple of his short stories before. They're very strange. He has one of the most unusual minds and one of the most unusual styles I've ever read, and I'm definitely going to read these and tell you about them. The Purple Cloud found this locally. I don't know anything about it. I started reading about this online when I was looking up HG Wells, and a lot of people who were talking about HG Wells early work were also mentioning the Purple Cloud by N.P. Shield. It was on the shelf at my local bookstore, so I picked it up. Look at this. HG Wells himself calls it colossal and brilliant. HG Wells said that, and then down here, New York Times says mad and dazzling, and then Hugh Walpole says a flaming genius. Dimension of Miracles. I reviewed this last week, and along with it, sitting next to it on the shelf was this collection of Robert Sheckley short stories. I'm very much looking forward to reading this The Anything Box by Zena Henderson. This is a book that I reviewed some time ago, but I didn't have a copy of it. I finally got my own copy of it here, and we read the story that I remembered most vividly from this collection. Take a look at the title. This is a genius story. It's very short again. Like I said before, Zena Henderson's best work is in her short, short stories. I can't even begin to describe it. Much of the genius of this story is contained within the title. If you're like me, if you grew up in deep in the backwoods of rural America, and you know what an authentic backwoods American accent sounds like, this name, what most people would pronounce as Aunt Dade, is actually pronounced Ain't Dead. Walkin' Ain't Dead. Genius. Even contained within the title. Genius. Here's what the front is piece of this book. Horrifying, lyrical, poignant, terrible, beautiful, unique. That's Zena Henderson. If you're not reading Zena Henderson, god damn, read some of Zena Henderson. Jesus. Pump 6 and other stories by Paolo Basigallupi. I've only read one story by Paolo Basigallupi, and it's one of my favorite stories of all time. It's called The Fluted Girl. It's the second on the list. I read it in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine in the early 2000s. It's one of my all-time favorite stories, and on the strength of that story alone, I bought this collection. I special ordered this copy of Analog Science Fiction from June 1977, and the reason I did it is because this is where the first appearance of the screw fly solution was. Someday I'm going to talk about screw fly solution by itself. Jack Chalker, dance band on the Titanic. When I was in junior high and high school, Jack Chalker was my favorite author. I read everything he wrote at the time. He was hit and miss. The guy who runs the local bookstore, he said the same thing. Jack Chalker, yeah. This is a collection of short stories by Jack Chalker. He mostly didn't write short stories. The first story in here No Hiding Place was the first short story he ever published, and it's really interesting. The Playboy Book of Science Fiction. I ordered this for one reason, and one reason only. Right here, Frozen Journey by Philip K. Dick. I read Frozen Journey when I was very young. I remembered the title. I remembered what it was about, and I remembered that it was in Playboy, and that's all I remembered. When I looked it up online just a couple of weeks ago, I was very surprised and very pleasantly surprised to find that it was by Philip K. Dick. And as you would expect, it's very unusual. It's about a guy who's put into cryogenic freeze at the beginning of an interstellar space journey to another star. He soon realizes that he's awake. His body is asleep, but his mind is awake. This is very bad, as you can imagine. And as you would expect, Philip K. Dick does not go where you would expect with this story, because he's Philip K. Dick. Similar situation, Universe 10. I have a number of these Universe anthologies by Terry Carr. They're always good. I bought this one like the other one. I bought this one for one reason. Again, this was a story that I read when I was young and always remembered The Ugly Chickens by Howard Waldrop. Howard Waldrop is not a name that I'm familiar with, but I remembered the title of this story. I remembered what it was about. It's one of my most vivid reading experiences as a youngster. Again, I'll tell you briefly what it's about. There's a young graduate student, an ornithologist who's riding a city bus reading one of his textbooks. And this elderly black woman who's sitting next to him leans over and says, I ain't seen one of them ugly chickens in a long time. And he just smiles and nods, not really knowing what she's talking about. It's only when the bus stops and she's starting to walk out the door that he looks and realizes his book was open to a page that included a drawing of the extinct dodos of Mauritius and Madagascar. So he goes running off the bus to figure out what she meant. This story is a beautiful example of pure science fiction at its simplest. There are no aliens. There's no space travel. There's no alternate dimensions. It's actual realistic science. Highly recommended. The Ugly Chickens. I've got more William Slater. You know how much I like William Slater. There's a book called The Phantom Limb. I mean, just the titles of his books are frightening. Phantom Limb? God. This one I just finished reading today. It's called The Last Universe. This is one of his more recent books. Published in 2006. It's less than 10 years old. He must have published this just a couple of years before he died. I didn't know what this was about when I ordered it. The protagonist in this book is a teenage girl. Until I started reading it, I didn't realize that all of his protagonists have been teenage boys. This is the first time I've seen it where the protagonist is a teenage girl. At first, I didn't find it believable. But about halfway through the book, it started to get interesting. And then the book ended in a way that I didn't expect. That's always the best thing for me is something unexpected happening. Something that I don't predict. I'll always give props for something, for an author doing something that I didn't expect. Dragon Flight. Anne McCaffrey's first Dragon Writer's A Pern book. I've never read. I told you before or I reviewed Anne McCaffrey's Crystal Singer book, which I liked. So I'll give this a chance. Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. From November 1989. There's a reason I bought this, like with the other magazine. A Derge for Clowntown by James Powell. Uh, which is not science fiction. But it's one of the best stories I've ever read or actually heard because I heard it on an audiobook. And I'll talk about that very story and the audio version of it in a future episode. Okay, finally, in my last roundup video, I showed a copy of Planet of Adventure book two that I had just acquired at the local store. He didn't have book one, but I found this online. Anyway, this is Planet of Adventure book one, City of the Chash. This, uh, I had had, I had owned books three and four for a number of years and never read them because I didn't have the whole series. So I was very much looking forward to this. It started off very exciting, very much like, so he's got a map of the planet here. Um, it started off very much like the Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars book, an earthling astronaut who is trapped on a barbarian planet with the hostile tribes and aliens all over the place. And he has to rescue a princess. It's well written. It moves along. It holds your interest. You want to know what's going to happen next. It keeps you reading. This book, however, has some of the most aggressive misogyny I've ever seen in a book of its type. This book could have been written by one of these present day men's rights activists. Seriously. Um, so I'm wondering whether I'm going to continue to even read the second book. I have a lot that I want to say about it. So I will, I will devote a lengthy episode to just this book at some point. I'll cover Princess of Mars first and I'll start to cover the subject and then continue with this book. That's it for this time. I'll do something next week. I'll probably do just one review a week from now on, maybe two and there'll be episodes where I spend longer amounts of time covering a single book. So see you next time.