Latest posts
-
Sea Stories: Melville, Conrad, and the Ocean as Fate
There is a kind of book that cannot happen on land. Not because the action requires water, but because the sea does something to character that a drawing…
-
Rafael Sabatini and the Art of the Swashbuckler
“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” It is one of the great opening sentences in popular fiction, and it tells you…
-
Robinson Crusoe: The First English Novel and the Self-Made Man
In 1719 a sixty-year-old Londoner with a long career as a merchant, a spy, a pamphleteer, and a bankrupt published a book whose full title ran to a…
-
The Birth of Science Fiction: From Frankenstein to Wells
Science fiction has no founding charter and no single birthday, but it has a remarkably tight gestation. In a span of roughly eighty years — from a rainy…
-
Treasure Island: The Map That Invented the Pirate
Almost everything you picture when you imagine a pirate was invented by one man, in one book, and several of the details began as a joke between a father…
-
Jack London: The Call of the Wild and the Law of the North
Buck does not understand the snow. That is the first thing London tells us about the dog at the center of The Call of the Wild, and it is the whole novel…
-
H.G. Wells: The Man Who Invented the Future
In the space of five years — between 1895 and 1898 — a young, sickly, lower-middle-class Englishman who had trained as a science teacher…
-
John Carter of Mars: Burroughs’s Other Mythology
In 1911, a failed pencil-sharpener salesman in Chicago, deep in debt and convinced he could write garbage at least as well as the garbage filling the pulp…
-
Conan the Cimmerian: Robert E. Howard and the Birth of Sword and Sorcery
In June 1936, in Cross Plains, Texas, a thirty-year-old man learned that his mother would not wake from her final coma. He walked out to his car, took a…
-
Arsène Lupin: The Gentleman Thief Who Mocked Sherlock Holmes
At the end of his great duel with the English detective, Arsène Lupin loses. The case is decided against him; the master of method has, on points,…