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Re-reading this it becomes clear to me that Moebius' main background as a comic book artist was in the Western genre, under his birth name Jean Giraud. Both this and his other SF comics like "Arzach" and "Edena's World" are full of picture compositions straight out of a film by John Ford or Sergio Leone.

Another of Stapledon's predictions that are unintentionally comical to read in 2026 is that in his estimate manned spaceflight would not take place until millions of years in the future, by which humanity would have evolved into a race of telepathic giants. (genetically engineered by brains in vats commanding a elf-satyr-like slave caste) Who would conquer Venus and evolve into bat-people.

likewise it is first on this 3rd read or so that I pay attention to the role played in the chaotic and labyrinthine plot by the Bakallites, an enigmatic order of mystics who compete with both Major Grubert and Jerry Cornelius for dominion over the pocket universe hidden within a hollow asteroid where the story takes place

Giving this another reread, it's fascinating that I consider different things important about "The Airtight Garage" every time I read it - today the Gnostic Christian allegories and anti-colonialist political subtext aren't what I pay most attention to like they were last time I read it

the Martians who appear halfways through seem to have been the inspiration for the alien in the recent film "Nope", now that I think of it

Jeg har besluttet mig for endelig at få læst den her færdi. I de senere digte bliver Holcks skrivestil og temaer meget mere varierede efterhånden som han begynder at tage udgangspunkt i et naturvidenskabeligt matematisk verdensbillede, men så opbryde og forvrænge det på en masse forskellige måder. Her synes jeg tingene for alvor begynder at blive interessante, ender nogle helt andre steder end de tidlige.

This starts out with a bunch of extremely off base forecasts about WW2 (that probably made more sense when this book was published back in 1930) before the author just firing off every single batshit crazy idea for a fictional society he could think of, I can't think of many other SF authors than Olaf Stapledon who can come up with as "out there" ideas for worldbuildings as you see here and in "The Starmaker".

SO MANY of Freud's dream interpretations hinge on puns that only make sense in the German language

Just read Vallée's analysis of the cattle mutilations associated with UFOs, he meets a biker who mentions an occult group responsible for the cattle mutilations right down to giving a membership list. (in other words proving the UFO connection to be partial misinformation) However, Vallée finds out that the members did not have time in their schedules for ALL the mutilations blamed on them...

The second story follows a blacksmith who ended up crippled after an accident involving a mystery metal that his father brought from a travelling merchant, strongly hinted to be leftover supertech from the Old Ones. (i. e. one of the few Earth humans left on the Witch World) He then ends up carving strange animals from psychic visions, hinted to be lifeforms native to the planet before conquest by the Old Ones...

Interesting that Vallée encountered the Heaven's Gate movement back when they were called "Human Individual Metamorphosis", even in the late 1970's they gave off a lot warning signs for being the type of movement that would eventually commit mass suicide a la Jonestown for ufologists.

He writes about the Order of Melchizedek, a UFO religion that was big in the 1970's but is now forgotten. (unlike the Raëlians)

The first story "Dragon Scale Silver" is really engaging and poetically written, I think I prefer it over the 2 novels in the series I've read. Even if it contains some of the same themes - it follows the son and daughter of an exiled nobleman with a dark secret, who become a renowned warrior and sorceress respectively. (one of the enemy factions also uses what is clearly laser weaponry, reminding us this is SF)

Decided that I want to finish this one time for all since I have rekindled my interest in dream interpretation. It's fairly dense and heavy stuff you can't read casually, with point-by-point analyses of patients' dreams and decodings of how the layers of symbolism relate to each other. (even the significance of names of characters and places in the dreams that don't appear in reality)

Here it gets really interesting: Kaththea and her romantic rival end up fleeing to a city inhabited by the remnants of a civilisation that still maintains a space age level of technology. There they meet grotesque cyborgs as well as biological robots resembling the aliens that abducted Betty and Barney Hill in the mid 1960's, led by a character resembling UFO contactee George Adamski's Venusian friend Orthon!

This follows Kaththea, the witch sister of the previous volume's protagonist Kemoc, after she lost her psionic powers as a consequence of last book's events. Here she gets taken in by the Vupsalls, a nomaic tribe who are a simultaneous fantasy counterpart of Inuit and Vikings, and trained to become their next seer.

Jeg kan godt lide at den her indeholder nogle af mine personlige favoritter af Robert E. Howards Conan-historier, der også adskiller sig meget fra hinanden: "Den sorte kysts dronning", "Elefantens tårn" og "Skumringens Xuthal". (hvor Conan kæmper imod en Lovecraftiansk udenjordisk gud og vinder) Og de 2 andre, "Den sorte cirkels folk" og "Røde søm", har jeg i lang tid gerne ville læse men har ikke kunne finde.

also interesting to learn that people keep having encounters with human-like Nordic aliens with an androgynous glamourous fashion sense well into the 21st century, despite the Greys having superseded them as the pop culture standard image of what extraterrestrials look like - as Redfern points out it's only the United States where the Greys are the most commonly reported extraterrestrials

this is clearly a beginner's book and introduction to the topic of 1950's era UFO contactees but even then it contains some information I was unfamiliar with especially regarding Orfeo Angelucci, like when he attached bacteria dish experiments to hot air balloons in the 1940's and saw a flying saucer intercept them (this was before the 1947 UFO explosion by the way)

Lots of themes and exact plot points here are similar to ones in "Dune", like the genetically distinct witch-subraces where the psychic powers only belong to women with the book's protagonist being the first male individual to possess them. I wonder if Frank Herbert and André Norton were aware of each other or arrived independently at the same ideas at the same time?

got a couple of the Witch World books at a science-fiction convention earlier this year and I found out that the public libraries where I live have another volume so I decided to read them, looks like a "science-fiction story where the main characters only have a fantasy genre vocabulary for understanding things because their spacefaring civilisation collapsed and regressed to a mediaeval level of technology" thing

This is very clearly the type of book where you can tell that a ton of nuances and details INEVITABLY go over your head the first time you read it, no matter how attentively you do so. Which reminds me that I look forward to re-reading "The Waves" after the first time in a couple years...

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