A new page has been published in the story Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
A new page has been published in the story Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
Deliveries seem simple, don’t they? Pick up Thing A from Place B, then take it over to Place C. But it gets surprisingly complicated if Place B is clear on the other side of the City of Tomorrow, hundreds of miles away;
and if Thing A turns out to be a Cardiophilic Moisture Eliminator, well. Boy Howdy! You’ve got all kinds of trouble.
That’s why we leave package deliveries to the valiant, well-trained delivery persons of the Retropolis Courier Service.
We’ve all admired their splendid livery, and we’ve envied them their compact, high-flying scooters; we’ve gratefully handed them our (usually non-Cardiophilic) packages, and we’ve taken their speedy deliveries from faraway parts.
Very few of us have sent anything into – or out of – the Experimental Research District. But if we have, or if we do, it will be a specially trained Route X Courier who makes sure that package arrives at its destination with a low, low incidence of unpleasant side effects. Special rates apply.
So here we see Grace Keaton, a Route X Courier herself. She seem to be the poster person for the Courier Service.
And of course this is a poster, over at Retropolis; it’s also an archival print, and a coffee mug.
Grace is a character I invented for a sequel to Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. She’s now had a cameo in Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory and she’ll probably return in the sixth Retropolis Registry of Patents story. That’s something I need to get to work on right about now.
By which I mean I don’t really know, myself. Oh, and if you missed it, you can click on the first image to see it way, way bigger. Or you could just click here.
A new page has been published in the story Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
A new page has been published in the story Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
If there was a single cause – an inciting incident – for some of my recent changes at Retropolis, it was probably the loss of one of the vendors I use to make the merchandise I sell there.
But one thing led to another thing, and then there was this thing that popped up after that, and before I knew it I’d reworked some of the existing Retropolis pages. Is it over? Hard to say.
But I started with the home page, and then moved on to the bookstore page (a big improvement!) and just now I finished reworking the “About Retropolis” page, too. I made some minor changes to product images in the Retropolis Travel Bureau section. Some necessary surgery to the menus led to other changes. Like I said, one thing led to another.
“About Retropolis” really did need an update, once I thought about it. Now it’s got newer art and a slightly different and more interesting, and, frankly, laborious layout that no one but me may really appreciate.
There’s some lingering weirdness in the site’s overall layout (which dates from The Days of Browsers We Will Not Speak Of) and I could handle things in a far more sensible way today. But I don’t think I will. Even I am not that crazy. Not this morning, anyhow.
A new page has been published in the story Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
AbeBooks is a huge marketplace of independent used booksellers, with each one posting their own catalog of titles into a single massive online bookstore. Now and then they curate special collections like this one; the curated collections may be a little easier to navigate than the wide-open search that you usually use at the site.
The Pulp magazines collection we’re looking at today offers a pretty wide selection of magazines from the 1930’s on, all with their vibrant (if faded) covers, all in the original format, and often available at tempting prices. You can expect a range of prices because each of these sellers may value their stock a little differently. And as always with vintage publications there are some good copies along with some others that are showing their age.
It’s a great collection that has many examples from Amazing Stories and Astounding but doesn’t neglect their less iconic rivals, like Planet Stories or Super Science Stories. And, you know, All This Could Be Yours.
A new page has been published in the story Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
This Wednesday marks the beginning of the fourth Retropolis Registry of Patents story at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.
This time, Violet and Ben Bowman have to deal with the problems of Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory. This story stands apart from the earlier Registry of Patents stories because it’s told almost completely from Violet’s point of view. Ben is active, but offstage, for nearly the entire time.
And this gives us a chance to take a closer look at Violet, and her quest for a promotion, and what that kind of promotion means to a robot who was designed to be a secretary. If her single-minded devotion to her goal seemed excessive earlier, you may find that it’s both more and less excessive than it seemed. Or you may find that she’s the most horrific employee a manager could imagine. A lot of this depends on your perspective.
There’s a cameo appearance by Grace Keaton, courier and graduate student; there’s an air traffic emergency; there’s an example of the lingering, malevolent feuds that can rise up to divide neighbors, especially if each of those neighbors is a mad scientist; there’s an imminent, terrifying threat to a fishing vacation; and there’s an office betting pool, because it’s an office.
It’s an almost ordinary day at the Registry of Patents. Starting Wednesday!
A new page has been published in the story Fenwick’s Improved Venomous Worms, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
