Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Super Heroes

250px-BadroulbadourYes, it’s Friday, and I should be posting a picture for you out there to use as a writing prompt.

But today, I’m going for something a little diferent.
I’m posting here a link, to a wonderful website called Public Domain Super Heroes.

Which contains a long list of – you guessed it – super heroes and comic book characters that happen to be in the public domain.
And not just super heroes…

Badroulbadour (“full moon of full moons”) is a princess from the far east to whom Aladdin was married in The Story of Aladdin; or, the Wonderful Lamp (the full moon as a metaphor for female beauty is common throughout the Arabian Nights).

You can browse the website – hosted by Wikia – for its documentary value, or just pick a character, and write your own story.
Or draw your own comic.
Beats churning out crappy fanfiction every day of the week.

Enjoy!

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Ruins, and pleasures thereof

9780500241189There is a book that casts a long and twisted shadow over my various interests, hobbies and activities.
It is a 500-odd pages hardback tome, wrapped in a pink dust jacket, and it’s called Pleasure of Ruins, by Rose Macaulay.
It was originally published in 1953 but my copy is an integral reprint by Thames and Hudson.
I believe other abridged editions exist.

 

Rosa Macaulay was a prolific novelist, a woman of learning, daughter of a famous Classical scholar.
From her bio on Wikipedia I find she was related on her mother’s side with the Conybeare family – and Conybeare is a well-known name to me, as one of Macaulay’s close relations was a well-respected (if somewhat sarcastic) paleontologist.

Continue reading →


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A Silk Road novel

2479945I took the Sunday off, and decided to relax with a good book.
Silk Road is a very fine historical fantasy by Jeanne Larsen.
It was published in 1989 – my copy is a Henry Holt hardback I bought second hand about two or three years back, and then decided to save it for a good time.

From what I can see, the novel was not marketed as fantasy – the tag line reads “a novel of eight-century China”, and I guess this was sold as straight historical fiction.

And yet, there’s a lot of imaginative stuff, between these covers – gods and goddesses, ghosts, dragons.
There’s a nice dollop of Taoist magic, and a lot of Chinese mythology. Continue reading →


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Huckleberry Finn’s Interdimensional Capers

I was talking about this with some online friends a few nights back – The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a 1968 Hanna-Barbera live action/animation series I saw, in glorious black and white and dubbed in Italian… ah, probably in 1973 or ’74.

The premise is pretty, ehm, straightforward: Huck, Tom and Becky, pursued by Injunjoe, enter a complex of caves that happen to be…
Your guess is as good as mine – I’d say interdimensional gateways to parallel universes.

Weird?
You bet.
Fun?
Quite.

Here’s a snippet of a vaguely Wilkie Collins-esque episode.
You find the rest on Youtube.

Enjoy!

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