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Goodreads Book Review: The Big Clock, by Kenneth Fearing...plus new page on my Goodreads essays

7/28/2020

I have wanted to read Kenneth Fearing’s 1946 The Big Clock, the novel made into the great Ray Milland film of the same name, for years and years. To my great delight, about eight or nine months ago I finally found an early 1960s printing at good ol’ Curious Books in East Lansing. A few days ago, I got around to reading it...and somehow I remembered about Goodreads.com, and I did a review there, which I hadn’t done in two and a half years.

Originally, I was going to link and post the review in my blog, as I’ve done with others, but then I got an even better idea: Why not make a new page in the “My Writings” area that’s specifically for my occasional Goodreads reviews?

OK, so I did it. Ta daaaaa. Later reviews will be posted on the blog, hopefully, but for this one I’ll simply link to my new page. Click there, and then just use the alpha-beta system to find The Big Clock.

Hope you enjoy,

Rafeeq

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Seven Weeks of Heinlein Art Updates!

7/27/2020

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As July draweth to a close, I suddenly realize that the last month and a half has been pretty busy in terms of updates to my Heinlein cover art galleries. In addition to new-to-me editions of books like Waldo and Magic, Inc., Orphans of the Sky, The Man Who Sold the Moon, Time for the Stars, and Podkayne of Mars, I also have come across quite a bit of things from magazines.

I picked up reprints of “Water is for Washing,” for example, a Heinlein review of a Willy Ley text in the July 1944 Astounding, an article in the 28 May 1949 Saturday Review of Literature that discusses Heinlein pretty prominently, “Tenderfoot in Space” serialized in Boys’ Life in 1958, a reprint of “Gentlemen, Be Seated,” “The Black Pits of Luna” in its original 1948 Saturday Evening Post, and “No Bands Playing” from the December 1973 Vertex.

And beyond these... Well, at last I also acquired some rather rarely found things as well: “Cliff and the Calories” from the August 1950 Senior Prom, where in this girls’ magazine he is bylined only as “R. Heinlein”; “The Long Watch” in the December 1949 issue of the American Legion Magazine; and the extraordinarily elusive “My Object All Sublime,” published under the Lyle Monroe byline in the February 1942 issue of the peculiarly titled Future Combined with Science Fiction. “My Object All Sublime,” by the way, is one of the early “stinkeroos” that was never, ever, ever reprinted until the big $1,500 leather-bound Virginia Edition of Heinlein’s complete works, and it was great to read it in the original nearly 80-year-old pulp.

Of all the aforementioned, I’m not sure whether “Cliff and the Calories” or “My Object All Sublime” is rarest, but “The Long Watch,” originally released as “Rebellion on the Moon,” is perhaps my favorite. This rousing and yet poignant tale of an upright young officer who receives a fatal dose of radiation while disobeying a direct order and thus preventing his superior from using deterrent rockets to stage a putsch that would enslave the world, with the youngster then sitting there calmly smoking his last cigarette before the chattering Geiger counter, thinking of his wife, and of his baby girl being able to grow up in freedom, while the patriots of American history gather close in the final moments of his watch, always literally gives me goosebumps. This is the one I will picture now.

Rafeeq

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Goodreads Book Review: The Big Clock, by Kenneth Fearing...plus new page on my Goodreads essays

Seven Weeks of Heinlein Art Updates!

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