Apologies for being absent in recent weeks / months. It was a crazy stressful time at work, involving various business trips to faraway places. It’s time for some stress-reduction! And some whimsy! Y
The haunting soundtrack by Eduard Artemyev for the masterpiece SF film Solaris has been floating around the inter-tubes. I didn’t really care for any of the existing DVD or CD cover artwork, so I c
A discussion of fandom and Harold P. Zitzow’s Science Fiction Collection, as related by his daughter, Liz Zitzow. Harold Zitzow learned telegraphy from a correspondence cours
One of the great satirical classics of Science Fiction is surely “Space Merchants,” by Fred Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, which skewers the American traditions of corporate greed, deceptive advertising, and the treatment of consumers as stooges, suckers, retarded fools, and miserable cattle. The story accomplishes this in a slick, almost effortless Science Fiction setting, which is fast-paced and chock full of sadistic irony. It’s important to remember the context of American society at the time of publication — 1953 — when the Cold War was in full swing, and the complete subservience to the Capitalist credo was not only the mood of the times, but was enforced by psychological warfare, not the least of which were accusations, blacklists, and finally the foaming-mouthed lunacy of McCarthyism.
DBR Podcast 2 - Memoirs of a Revolutionist. An excerpt from Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs describing the ideals of young socialists in Russia during
An excerpt from Wiktor Woroszylski’s Life of Mayakovsky (1970), in which Mayakovsky meets Berliuk for the first time and also composes his first poem. The setting is Moscow, 1911, at the School of Pai