Reading for Enjoyment – 2

Seeking to free myself from following politics on the Internet, I picked up an old, paperback collection of science fiction short stories. John W. Campbell wrote “Who Goes There?”, the short novel that was adapted into The Thing From Another World.

Campbell wrote a fantastic forward-thinking short story, called “Twilight,” in 1934. Predating WWII, mankind’s end doesn’t come from atomic war. Instead, it has a Rachel Carson ending. Reading “Twilight” this morning reminded me of how much I enjoyed reading science fiction as a kid into my young adult years.

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~ge/artfuldesign/think66/2019/stuff/twilight.pdf

Me at 15, wearing my new metal frame glasses at the 1971 World Science Fiction Convention in Boston

Imperial Rebellion, There Then and Here Now

I’m re-watching season 1 of Andor, a series that takes a springboard leap from a single throwaway line in the original Star Wars. “How will the Emperor maintain control, without the bureaucracy?” Sorry about the low sound volume.

Andor shows us the bureaucracy in all of its relentless oppression and cold brutality. Without the Jedi and their lightsabers, with only a passing nod to The Force, what Tony Gilroy has done to expand the Star Wars backstory is just frickin’ complicated superb. I can’t say “simply” superb, because the workings of the Rebellion against the Empire are as complex as the Empire is itself.

You don’t even need to know anything about Star Wars, except that it exists, to get caught up in the series. Take an old prison movie, like 1930’s powerful The Big House, and filter it through George Lucas’ THX-1138, and you have some of the most compelling television I have ever seen.

The power goes out, an alarm sounds, and “something’s really wrong on two!”

Wait. How the ding-dong heck did I miss this? Diego “Andor” Luna had a guest host run last week on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Reading for Enjoyment

Although I don’t often listen to audiobooks…

ARLO & JANIS © Johnson. Used By Permission of ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION for UFS. All Rights Reserved.

… what’s true for Arlo also applies to me.

ARLO & JANIS © Johnson. Used By Permission of ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION for UFS. All Rights Reserved.

My own take on staying up too late, from when having an online life was a relative novelty and printers were still the dot-matrix variety.

© 2019 DOuG pRATt (Dog Rat), All Rights Reserved

At some point in my adult life, between the requirements of work and family, my fiction reading became more sporadic than it had been in my relative youth. This NYTimes article is shared paywall-free.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/style/fiction-books-men-reading.html?unlocked_article_code=1.SE8.ZKiU.rqXGvTl4omoJ&smid=url-share

Getting an Inkling

Vince Colletta had a long run of inking Kirby’s Thor, but in his rush to finish an assignment he would sometimes cut corners. Which he didn’t apparently do on this interior splash page.

Kirby/Colletta from Thor #153

Bill Everett inked some issues of Thor. This page makes for a good comparison.

Kirby/Everett from Thor #175