I need to excise the word ‘though’ from my vocabulary, like I’ve just had to excise several instances of it from this morning’s post. It is clearly my most overused word.
📚 Books 2026, 17: The Three Eyes of Evil, by AE Van Vogt
I read this from the Balloch library several times when I was (much) younger. I really liked it, as proven by the fact of my repeated borrowing. Then the other day Warren Ellis mentioned getting an old book off Ebay, and this one popped into my head: could I get a copy of it, after all these years?
I could, and for only a few quid with the postage. It was soon here, and I read it over the weekend.
It’s not a novel, but rather a collection of two novellas: ‘The Three Eyes of Evil’ itself, and ‘Earth’s Last Fortress’. Neither title makes much sense. That is, they have only very tenuous connections with the stories. In the first, an accident leads a man to discover he has a third eye. This freakishness makes him somewhat cut off from society. Then, in conjunction with relaxation exercises designed to improve his vision, he discovers he can drop into another world, a parallel Earth. But it doesn’t make him evil. In the other world everyone has three eyes, and there are good and evil people, and people in between.
The second also concerns humans travelling by means of mental powers, but through time (though there is some sense of parallel worlds here too). There is an existential threat, certainly, but no actual or metaphorical fortress.
The powers brought on by the three eyes and the relaxation in the first was as much as I remembered of the whole book. I recalled liking the first story a lot more than the second. This time they were about equal.
Van Vogt was very interested in the idea of the supposed untapped potential abilities of the human brain and nervous system, here and in various of his other works. Which essentially makes these stories fantasy, not SF. Because what is psionics but magic with a different face?
Which is fine, but what of the stories? Van Vogt, it seems to me now, could tell a pretty good one from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph. But he wasn’t great at overall plotting, at least as evidenced by these two. There are jumps of scene, of events, that don’t really follow from what has gone before. It’s nothing that couldn’t be fixed with another editing pass or two, though.
His characterisation is much more limited. These are short works, so you might not expect too much development, but really there’s not a lot of character at all. I was pleased to find the second story has a woman as the lead, at least.
Other than that it’s all very much of its time. I’m glad to have read it again, but I wouldn’t exactly recommend it, except to aficionados like me.
Watched: Babylon 5: The Road Home 🎥
This animated sequel-of-sorts to the wonderful Babylon 5 TV series was released a few years ago, and I somehow missed out on the news. Heard about it a few months ago and was reminded again yesterday.
It’s good enough, but mainly for the chance to spend some more time with beloved characters. It doesn’t add anything to the overall story, nor detract from it. One for the fans.
The most intriguing thing for me about this alternative way of looking at The Great Wave is that I had never before realised there were boats in it!
Here's the original (first photo) and flipped (second). The idea is that since Japanese is read right-to-left, English speakers accustomed to left-to-right reading should see how it looks flipped, where it looks more like the boats are heading into the intimidating waves.
Watched: Billion Dollar Brain 🎥.
The third Harry Palmer film, and considerably more bizarre and confusing than the the first or second. Also a Ken Russell film, so that’s probably why. A mad Texan oil billionaire with a private army tries to trigger a third world war, basically
That BBC self-ad at half time of the World Cup Final was OK, but Mitch Benn did it better years ago with ‘I’m Proud of the BBC’ (YouTube link).
📚 Books 2026, 16: Use of weapons, by Iain M Banks
In which I interrupt a major work to reread a favourite (again), this time inspired by a podcast.
I have no idea how Dave Winer comes to this conclusion:
One of the silver linings of AI use is that it makes you a better writer.
Especially when one of the main things people (at least non-programmers) tout it for is doing your writing for you!
Watched: Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason 🎥.
I was sure I hadn’t seen it before, but I remembered some scenes as they happened. I have a vague memory of a DVD in a holiday house, perhaps. Partial falling asleep may have been involved.
It’s daft but fun in places.
📚 Books 2026, 15: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
I interrupted Moby Dick because I had a hankering to reread Illuminatus!, which by measure of number of reads must be my favourite book. I blogged about it in 2018 and 2015.
Endless fun, if you’re the type of person that a) rereads books at all, and b) likes spoofs about world-controlling conspiracies that are written in a breezy style that will have you in the mind of a squirrel in Central Park in one sentence and of a hippy journalist in Mad Dog, Texas the next. (I checked: sadly, Mad Dog, Texas is not a real town, though there is a ‘British pub’ called Mad Dogs in San Antonio.)
This from @JohnPhilpin sounds like reviews by John Clute in Interzone back in the day:
👁️ That moment when you open a blog post and you need to look up 4 words just in the first sentence.
Source: https://john.philpin.com/2026/06/25/that-moment-when-you-open.html
Minute Cryptic - 24 June, 2026 “Hermit perhaps returning alone, wandering city” (9) 🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣 🏆 0 hints – 3 under the community par (81,255 solvers so far). www.minutecryptic.com
Tough one, this. My first instinct was right, but I made a wrong guess.
This is what we’re faced with as the year hinges into its second half. Astronomically, if not by the calendar.
Just realised I hadn’t added Moby Dick to my ‘currently reading’ list. I’m only about a third in, totally loving it, and wondering why people think it’s hard. 📚
📚 Books 2026, 14: A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M Miller
A Canticle for Leibowitz is one of those books I’ve known of for years, known it was one of the classics of the genre, but never got round to reading, for one reason or another. But it caught my eye in a Canadian bookshop last year, and now I’ve got round to reading it.
I’m not sure I knew it was a post-holocaust work; nor did I know — though maybe the title should have been a clue — that it was so religious. So I started reading it mildly annoyed, I think, and became considerably more annoyed at the end of the first section (of three), when (and spoilers ahead) the main character, whose life in the monastery we’ve been following all this time, is killed.
Well damn. I didn’t expect that.
And then there’s a time jump of several centuries. OK, that’s one of the great things you can do with novels. We’re still with the monks of Saint Leibowitz, mainly, but technology is starting to pick up again. The fractured North America is forming into new kingdoms and tribes.
The third section begins, ‘There were spaceships again in that century…’ Which I really didn’t expect. Several centuries further on, technology’s back up, oh, and hey, we’ve got nukes again! The things that caused all the problems in the first place.
Of course, people know that now, so they won’t use them again, of course. Of course. But better get some monks and priests offplanet to the colonies, anyway. Gotta take the Word of God to the stars.
Which sorta kinda seems to be the message of this book? The Catholic church will endure and Christianity go on, even if The Beatles didn’t? Actually maybe they did, they just aren’t mentioned. It’s not like it was an anti-Lennon tract, it was published in 1959!
Anyway, yeah, it was fine, I didn’t love it. I’m just about to read an erudite piece about it, so I might get back with more.