Amber's Weird Library

 Once I read that The Willows by Algernon Blackwood scared cosmic horror writer, H. P. Lovecraft, I knew I had to try it out.  The story is about two men canoeing on the Danube River, with the goal of canoeing to the Black Sea. They reach an area between present-day Bratislava and Budapest devoid of human civilization and decide to stop to camp on a sand bar while the river swells because of flooding. There, they have a very creepy experience with something not of our world. Is it something supernatural or something that can be explained by science? It is more horrifying if it has a scientific explanation.  I am not sure Blackwood's intentions were with the creatures. I know that he was into the occult and theosophy and believed in other realms. Sometimes the line between our realm and the realm of the beyond is thin and things can seep through. That is why we see ghosts, etc. There could be a mystical explanation for the creatures. However, if they are creatures from ano...

     Millions of years in the future, when the sun is dying, the Earth has become tidally locked and attached to the moon with cob-like webs make by giant spider looking plants. Half of the planet is always in the daytime and half is always night. Most life lives in the perpetual afternoon . Plants dominate, they hunt, they fly, they hop, they graze, they even fight battles with one another. Humans survived but they look little like the humans of today. They are smaller and have green skin. They live in matriarchal tribes hopping through the branches of a giant Banyan tree trying to survive the last years of life on Earth. This is the setting of Hothouse by Brian Aldiss a story that begins as one of survival in the afternoon on Earth but ends up being a deep musing on intelligence and humanity.       Hothouse was originally published as a group of short stories that won the Hugo Award for Short Fiction in 1962 . We follow a tribe of future humans ...

     Solaris is a planet almost completely covered with an ocean of a plasma material. Scientists from Earth have been coming to Solaris for years trying to research this ocean that seems to be one sentient being. If it is one sentient being, then the scientists hypothesize that they should be able to communicate with it.       Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, is the newest researcher from Earth to arrive on the station hovering over Solaris . He is there to meet the other three scientists. He soon discovers that one of the scientists has taken his life, one is hiding, and one is acting mysteriously and talks about visitors. Then Kelvin meets his ex-girlfriend on the station, but the problem is that she took her own life 7 years before.       This is the mystery that sets up the novel Solaris . The story is told from the point of view of Kelvin as we follow him on the station trying to figure out how his ex-girlfriend can be there and ...

       After years of hearing about The Witcher I decided to give it a try. The Witcher books are now free for Kindle Unlimited readers so why not? I didn't think I would like it but it ended up being the kind of fantasy that I have been looking for my entire life. I even wrote a story similar to the first short story in the book The Last Wish as a teenager but hid it because I thought it was too weird.  (There must have been something going on in the collective unconscious in the late 1980's and 1990's.)  A similar story flashed in our minds, but, alas, I didn't have the confidence or talent of Andrzej Sapkowski.       I have also longed to read a fantasy story based in Eastern European folklore rather than in Western European folklore so that was an added bonus.      I was introduced to Geralt, the Witcher, in a very stereotyped beginning. The outsider in the tavern being challenged, he fights and kills so that the loca...

    WARNING: SOME SPOILERS       A wandering planet (planet comes from the Greek word meaning wanderer!) appears in the sky near the moon and causes destruction around the Earth. We jump around the world to see how this global disaster affects different people. It seems to affect most in a very sensuous way.       The book has several "spicy" scenes of older men seducing younger women in kinky ways. The aliens of the Wanderer are cat girls that one of our characters lusts for. The wandering planet seems to make the people of the world seek to let their inhibitions go and become sexually free in a dated 1960's way.        Free sex and rampant sexism aren't the only dated parts of the novel. There is also racism. One of the characters is a member of the KKK and three of the non-white characters are drug addicts treated as comedy relief.  While Leiber is attempting to show this side of American culture, especia...

      I am a little conflicted after finishing episode 5 of the Disney + series Alien: Earth . So far, the only human character I find interesting is the Chief Security Officer, Kumi Morrow of the Spaceship Maginot. That might be on purpose as he is probably the real protagonist rather than Wendy, the Android with the mind of a child. Or maybe that is a big fake out. None of the other humanoid characters really capture my attention. The aliens are the ones stealing the show for me.  I think this opens the world a little more and reminds me a little of Van Vogt's book The Voyage of the Space Beagle.    The Voyage of the Space Beagle follow the crew of men (there are only men) on their five-year mission to explore space outside of the Milky Way Galaxy. Along the way they encounter different aliens that threaten the crew in different ways like sucking the potassium out of their blood or laying their eggs in the men's stomachs. What makes the stories more...