There strikes me as being a whole unwritten novel sandwiched between those two Simon posts...

Spacecraft 2000-2100 and Great Space Battles, by Stewart Cowley and Charles Herridge.

In the late 1970s Chartwell Books, a British publisher specializing in lavishly-illustrated works of popular nonfiction, decided to take advantage of the post-"Star Wars" boom in science fiction by bringing out a pair of books that applied their usual nonfiction format to science fiction. Both were illustrated with full-color, large-format reproductions of the sort of detailed paintings of spacecraft and alien worlds that one normally saw on sci-fi paperback covers. Both purported to be official publications of a future government agency called the Terran Trade Authority.

Spacecraft 2000-2100 mimics those illustrated guides to different makes of automobiles, aircraft, ships, etc. that have long been so common. It consists of dozens of illustrated articles on various types of military and civil spacecraft. Each article contains technical specifications on the type, with a couple of paragraphs on the type's operational history and significance. Through these, the reader gets glimpses of the future history of which these spacecraft are a part. There are sometimes notes about surviving examples, such as are often seen in articles about World War II "warbird" aircraft and the like. All in all, it's a very well-done, completely straight-faced imitation of a nonfiction book of this sort. There's even a biographical note on author Stewart Cowley's future self (Turns out he was a space fighter pilot back in the War, and now has a hobby of building spacecraft models out of macaroni). This may well have been one of the inspirations for the "Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe," which came out only a couple of years later.

Great Space Battles carries the future history a couple of centuries beyond the 21st century. The first half or so deals with the epic war between the Terran Empire and the mysterious inhabitants of the Laguna system. The rest is filled out with shorter stories about space colonists encountering weird phenomena, a rebellion against the Terran Trade Authority back on Earth, and tales of piracy and organized crime in space. None of the stories has more than a few thousand words of text--Chartwell Books were always mostly pictures. But they are generally well-written in imitation of those concise, lavishly-illustrated popular histories put out by the likes of National Geographic, Readers' Digest, and, later, DK. The stories are pretty good when you consider that they used pre-existing, completely unrelated illustrations for story prompts. Both books have scores of wonderful paintings by science fiction illustrators and concept artists like Angus McKie and Peter Elson. And the work was all done in the pre-digital art age, too.

Our family acquired a copy of Great Space Battles from K-Mart (remember them?) back in the day. My brother and I read it over and over again. We were frustrated at the book's blurb for Spacecraft 2000-2100, since we wanted to read it so badly, yet never so much as saw a copy of it in the store. I finally had the chance to read that one in the college library. Later, I found a used copy of it available in good condition. As for Great Space Battles, I last saw the family copy of that one years ago in my brother's house. Hope he's been taking good care of it! I had given up hope of getting my own copy, since it now seems to be a pricey collector's item. Then, only a couple of weeks ago, I ran across a reasonably-priced copy. It's been great to have a chance to catch up on a piece of my childhood like that.

Andrew Roberts's Napoleon is the first one-volume biography to take advantage of the recent publication of Napoleon's thirty-three thousand letters, which radically transform our understanding of his character and motivation. At last we see him as he was: protean multitasker, decisive, surprisingly willing to forgive his enemies and his errant wife Josephine. Like Churchill, he understood the strategic importance of telling his own story, and his memoirs, dictated from exile on St. Helena, became the single best-selling book of the 19th century.

Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever Hardcover – October 24, 2023

Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

King Kong, by Delos W. Lovelace

Though I've known for years that there was a 1930s novelization of the 1933 movie, I had never seen it. I also didn't know that it came out shortly before the movie did. I found a beat-up 1970s reprint in my travels a few weeks ago.

The story is brief and very fast-moving, as befits an adaptation of the original Kong script. The whole thing reads very much like a contemporary pulp magazine story. Which is hardly surprising.

Like most novelizations, it differs a bit from the movie. They're often based on earlier drafts of the scripts, and of course there's always going to be at least some adaptation needed to transfer a story from a visual to a text-based medium. A couple of members of the ship's crew get names in the book version. The dialog is largely different. The outline of the story is quite close to what we see in the movie, but many of the incidents differ in detail. There's some four-letter language that a 1930s Hollywood movie wouldn't have gotten away with. And there's lots and lots of "male gaze" descriptions of the lovely Ann Darrow.

Reading the story, it's easy to notice problems that one doesn't have much time to notice when watching the fast-moving screen version. There are various problems in the story's construction, characterizations, treatment of its sole significant female character, and treatment of Skull Island's natives that should be obvious enough not to need to go into. Reading the book also gave me a greater realization of just how brutal the off-screen treatment of the captive Kong must have been. Ripping him out of his island habitat and dragging him overseas to turn him into a freak-show exhibition really was a heedlessly destructive and irresponsible act--and would have been even if it hadn't gone so horribly wrong. But then, in a way, the movie itself represents Kong's destructive escape as a comeuppance for those heedless acts. Character Carl Denham may have had his admirable qualities, but he is also a reckless, flawed man who ends up with a lot to answer for.

Anyway, this is not the sort of story it makes sense to think too much about. Which is part of why the movie still holds up so well (That and fantastic pioneering special effects). The movie is a justly-recognized classic. The novelization...well, it's about par for the course, as far as both 1930s pulp stories and movie novelizations of any era go.

I just read the other day that Adolph Hitler liked to unwind by watching movies, including Hollywood productions.

Just finished Jews.

Just finished Jaws. Movie is better, since it doesn’t take a hard right turn into soft porn for two chapters right in the middle.

Next up The Exorcist, Logan’s Run, and Planet of the Apes.

Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts.



I am enjoying learning about Napoleon. That said, I am not the biggest fan of Roberts' style.