Blast from the Past

Guest Post: Science Fiction Was Around in Medieval Times – Here’s What it Looked Like

12 September, 2018 // 1 Comment

Science fiction may seem resolutely modern, but the genre could actually be considered hundreds of years old. There are the alien green “children of Woolpit”, who appeared in 12th-century Suffolk [Read More ...]

Interactive Fiction is the Little Market That Could

11 September, 2018 // 5 Comments

There's a post referenced in tomorrow morning's link post that touches on interactive fiction. That piece claims IF is a new idea that is changing the market. The former claim isn't true, obviously, [Read More ...]

Guest Post: Eight Surprising Things it’s Time You Knew About Gulliver’s Travels

4 December, 2017 // 2 Comments

Happy 350th birthday, Jonathan Swift. Widely recognised as the leading satirist in the history of the English language, Swift found his way into the world 350 years ago on November 30, 1667. [Read More ...]

Old Coot Hates Modern Internet

2 July, 2017 // 10 Comments

There's been no end, in the nearly a quarter of a century since the modern internet began, of detractors talking about how wonderful things were before it existed. People were smarter before the [Read More ...]

A Time Capsule Associated With Jules Verne Has Been Discovered in the French Pyrenees

7 April, 2017 // 6 Comments

A French university has just announced what sounds like the plot for a new TV show. A multidisciplinary team of archaeologists and historians from the Paris Descartes University and The Explorers [Read More ...]

Guest Post: Seven Academic Books That Helped to Shape Modern Britain

24 January, 2017 // 0 Comments

To celebrate the diversity, innovation and influence of academic books over the course of modern history, seven specialists share the book they believe has been most influential on modern British [Read More ...]

Guest Post: The Myth of the Disappearing Book

1 November, 2016 // 3 Comments

After years of sales growth, major UK publishers reported a fall in their e-book sales for the first time this year, introducing new doubts about the potential of e-books in the publishing industry. [Read More ...]

The Gothic Novel: How Gothic Buildings Became Synonymous With Horror, and the Supernatural

30 October, 2016 // 1 Comment

Thanks to innumerable movies, Gothic architecture has long been associated with horror, Halloween, and the supernatural. The mere mention of Dracula or Frankenstein conjures visions of arched [Read More ...]

Guest Post: How a Volcano in Indonesia Led to the Creation of Frankenstein

15 September, 2016 // 0 Comments

As the summer of 2016 draws to a close, we mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of the most famous novels in the English language, a work that also recounts the creation of perhaps the most [Read More ...]

Publishing Industry Fads Have Been Happening for Nearly 300 Years

15 May, 2016 // 2 Comments

If you thought that the way the publishing industry jumps on the latest werehamster/interurban fantasy/cyclops detective/moody vampire/hipster zombie* fad is a new development, you would be wrong. [Read More ...]

Blast From the Past: Hands On With Amazon’s First Accessible eReader, the Kindle Keyboard (video)

11 May, 2016 // 3 Comments

Yesterday's news about the new Voiceview for Kindle accessibility feature has lead many news sites to proclaim that it is Amazon's first accessible ereader. Given that the feature came bundled with a [Read More ...]

1985 Pop-Up Book Takes Us Inside the PC (video)

12 April, 2016 // 1 Comment

The latest pop-up books can take us on a tour of the White House or remind us of the phobias we'd rather forget, but that's nothing compared to what has been published in the past. I've just come [Read More ...]

Apple at Forty: Can a Walled Garden Thrive in the New Digital Era?

1 April, 2016 // 7 Comments

Guest post: Mark Stilton, a business professor at Warwick University, discusses Apple on its fortieth anniversary. The stand-out feature of Apple’s 40-year rise to become the world’s largest [Read More ...]

Victorian Doctors Thought Reading Caused “Incurable Insanity”, Uterine Disease

24 March, 2016 // 0 Comments

As History Buff informed us on Tuesday, Victorian-era doctors were convinced that reading novels could lead to incurable insanity in women, but that's not the only ridiculous medical claim made in [Read More ...]

Pride, Prejudice and the Mutation of Zombies from Caribbean Slaves to Flesh-Eaters

19 February, 2016 // 7 Comments

When George Romero created what is now recognized as the first modern zombie flick in 1968, he hadn’t imagined his Night of the Living Dead zombies as – well, as zombies: To me back then, zombies [Read More ...]

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