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Not surprisingly the vast majority of really weird CE3K cases Randles brings up come from either Gray Barker, Albert Bender or John Keel. She also mentions the MIB photo taken by the late great Timothy Green Beckley.

around here it gets as incredibly beautifully written as I remember "The Waves" being, where it starts switching perspectives between the various main characters (not just Clarissa Dalloway herself) and throws in visionary experiences and dream sequences that are more fantastic and otherworldly than anything most fantasy and science-fiction authors could dream up with

Contains a lot of information about MIB cases from outside the United States, in particular the UK and Australia which is not a surprise considering that Jenny Randles is British. A lot of the cases seem to be civilian pranksters and conmen impersonating Air Force personnel, to the point the RAF and USAF both conducted investigations into civilians impersonating officers from both British and American militaries...

significantly more conventional and easier to follow than "The Waves" but nowhere as spacy as either, still beautifully written and gives a good sense of how everything looked and felt in interwar-era Britain

Reading this after Jonathan Downes' "Island of Paradise" and it's interesting to see Radford actually cite not just that but also Karl Shuker's books as sources!

Also interesting to see that after the Chupacabra folklore escaped from Puerto Rico to other Hispanic cultures, reports end up describing creatures that have nothing in common other than mutilating livestock.

Resumed reading this, gotten to the part where he enrolls at a prestigious art academy in Saint Petersburg and finds it really boring. (and getting there in the first place took a lot of political maneouvering because of all the institutionalised anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia)

Not surprisingly Vallée also spends a lot of time discussing French UFO cases that back then weren't well known in English-speaking countries. He also criticises Project Blue Book's study of UFO reports for making methodological errors that to him are obvious, and is more open towards the extraterrestrial hypothesis than he would be later in his career.

This follows the author's investigation of a British UFO case in the 1990's, and is as much a journalistic document of the various subcultures surrounding Forteana in the UK back then. For example he goes into detail about how the hippie and punk subcultures in the country had changed since their heyday in the 1960's and 1970's, as well as the Romani community in the UK.

this is basically for Puerto Rico what "The Owlman and Others" by the same author was for Cornwall, i. e. as much a travelogue and overall introduction to the area's culture + history as a book about legendary beasts in the local folklore

this is way more "hard science" in its perspective than "Passport to Magonia" which took more of a humanistic and folkloristic angle, also interesting to read about pre-Kenneth Arnold UFO cases that even I have never heard of until now

Loved the chapter dedicated to photographs of distant galaxies, with some galaxies pulling stars away from each other and either colliding or being in the process of merging - looks really trippy! I can tell photographing this was one of the Hubble telescope's main purposes, since Edwin Hubble established one time for all that other galaxies than the Milky Way existed. (which was under dispute until the 1920's)

Hun gør det klart her at hendes erfaring fra sexindustrien, hvor hun arbejdede på et dyrt og luksuriøst bordel (et job hun virkelig godt kunne lide at have), ikke kan sammenlignes med de prostituerede som går på gaden. (som har haft det betydeligt sværere i gennemsnit)

fascinating to not just see those trippy photos of star nebulae, but also being pointed out that we only see them from Earth from one particular angle, and the "cat's eye" nebula is in fact more cylindrical in shape

er nogenlunde kommet til der hvor hun lige er blevet gangbanged af nok politibetjente til at være i en hel mandskabsvogn, pga et væddemål hun lavede med sin karate-instruktør

Things I did not remember from first read: The one black/Polynesian lover of Sabina, Mambo, criticising her for fetishising him as a representative of a foreign culture more than an individual; the Irish police officer Donald belittling women as a result of unexamined issues with his mother specifically singling out Marie Curie, Joan of Arc and Amelia Earheart; the wounded RAF officer John's survivor's guilt.

Giving this a re-read for the first time in 2 years after reading the author's first 2 books "Winter of Artifice" and "House of Incest" which both contain several themes and characters that I can recognise as later appearing here.

"The Voice" not only deals with lesbian relationships in a very explicit way for a mainstream novel from the 1930's, but is also one of the single trippiest and most mystical pieces I have read by Anaïs Nin so far. Might even qualify as non-standard occult fiction?

I also got a guy at the park interested in reading Anaïs Nin just by describing this to him.

Even as early in her career as this, it's just uncanny how much more beautifully and evocatively Anaïs Nin wrote than 95% of other authors I have read. The title short story in "Winter of Artifice" is also clearly inspired by her own strained relationship with her father.

absolutely amazing almost psychedelic photographs of all the nebulae, galaxies, planets and so on photographed by the Hubble telescope; also goes into detail about the history of the telescope and the technical issues it ran into when first launched

for the first half this plays like basically a very eccentric take on the whole cyberpunk noir detective subgenre, before then flying off into the trippiest possible interpretations of quantum mechanics - curious to see how this pans out

I also like "The Basque and Bijou" about a prostitute who becomes an artist's model and girlfriend, and the resulting complications between them. This is very interesting from a feministic perspective because it goes into detail about the roles that women from very different walks of like felt constrained by in the 1920's/1930's.

This is the type of intersection between pornography and character-driven drama with complex plotlines, combined in a genuinely stylish and artistic manner, that was popular in the 1970's and to some extent the 1980's but has fallen out of favour since then. (a sign of people in the past being more openminded than now, at least in some ways?)

At any rate, this collection is a 5/5 just for the story "Elena" alone.

absolutely loving this, fascinating to read about all the realistic ways a stranded astronaut might possibly survive in a Mars colony using technology that space agencies are currently considering using for such a purpose

just over 50 pages in but I can already feel I need to read everything twice in order to grasp Marc Chagall's convoluted and chaotic family history, I can however recognise many of the formative events in his life from several of his paintings already

Mest interessante digt her indtil videre er "Det samme hvide lys" på s. 129, der indbygger en masse naturvidenskabelig jargon og psykedeliske mentale billeder i den kosmiske mysticisme og udforskning af indre følelsesliv, der kører som rød tråd igennem de fleste af digtene. Her kan man virkelig mærke flere ubeslægtede universer kollidere med hinanden og skabe noget unikt

I like that the author constantly notices that most of the food in Afghanistan isn't full of ingredients pretty much every single scientist considers unhealthy, like back home in the UK

der er nogle noveller jeg forstår bedre denne gang fx Simon Christiansens vælg-dit-eget-eventyr "Fanget i tiden" (der inkluderer nogle meget indviklede tidsrejseparadokser), Helle Jakobsens uforudsigelige dystopi "PXx21894" og Flemming Raschs meget komplekse space opera "Omvej ved de ydre planeter", der også er betydeligt "hårdere" rent videnskabeligt end gennemsnittet for genren

Virkelig flotte beskrivelser af natur, kosmos og inderlige følelser; det er også tydeligt hvordan Holcks skrivestil bliver mere ambitiøs og kompleks efterhånden som han bliver ældre.

så den her på biblioteket og jeg husker at have fundet et par af novellerne meget underholdende, bliver interessant at genlæse den og se om der er nuancer jeg lægger mærke til denne gang som jeg ikke forstod før

Way more action packed than the first Foundation book, story structure and overall tone here clearly inspired George Lucas quite a bit for "The Empire Strikes Back". The starship captain Han Pritchard also predicts Harrison Ford's Han Solo in the "Star Wars" movies.