🤘🏼[Bat Time]🤘🏼

Michael Newton’s Monsters, Mysteries and Man was a bit of a mystery for me for many years. I remembered it from my local library (it was at the Main, which I didn’t go to as much as the closer, smaller Branch). I had gotten it out before a trip to my grandparents' house and I distinctly remember reading it in bed there in almost one sitting. I remembered that it had a garish monster head on the cover and that the title reminded me of Richard Cavendish’s Man, Myth and Magic series, but that was all I could remember. Searching, for years, on the internet, turned up zilch.

And then, sometimes, I find that magic combination of words on the right site and boom, there it is, the thing I was looking for all those years. The site in question was Archive.org, so hey, you can read it too. The dust jacket is magnificent, isn’t it?

The text was a bit less noteworthy all these years later. It’s a general survey of crytpids — Yeti, Sasquatch, surviving dinosaurs, sea and lake monsters, Kraken, Nessie, UFOs — and the efforts to find and study them. Two more chapters cover vampires and werewolves, but they are half-hearted because there’s no meaningful chance that they are real. And that’s what Newton wants. He’s the opposite of skeptical Daniel Cohen; the whole book is arranged around finding the small holes of doubt in the skeptic’s argument and filling them to brimming with the hope of the believer. Considering not much has changed on any of these fronts in my lifetime, I don’t expect they ever will. Sorry Mike.

The Gang’s all here!

⭐️Through the Generations⭐️

Happy to share that these will be unlockable pin designs in my upcoming pony pin kickstarter!

Though people associate it with very old science fiction, you won't see any occurrence of the term in its current meaning (a human inhabitant of the planet Earth, as opposed to an extraterrestrial) prior to 1949.

Actually, the term was first used by the Old Man himself, Robert E. Heinlein, in his 1949 novel "Red Planet" (a novel remembered for a weird digression where they explain the ethics of adults responsibly allowing children to carry loaded firearms). This all the way back when the Old Man was not quite so old yet, when RAH was actually a hotshot young lion looking to make a name for himself in the pages of the greatest scifi pulp of them all, Astounding Science Fiction under John W. Campbell, right at the dawn of the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

Heinlein created the term Earthling and used it in a lot of his work instead of human because it was very important to distinguish in his stories between humans from Earth and, say, colonists of human stock from Mars, like in Podkayne of Mars. Hello, Mars used another interesting term with the same origin, where humans born in space referred to humans that lived their entire life on earth (semi-derogatorily) as "groundhogs."

The term caught on because Heinlein used it in his juveniles (what today we'd call "young adult" books), and to every generation prior to the Millennials, Heinlein was THE science fiction writer, much like how Agatha Christie is THE mystery author. It's a strange irony that, now that young adult books run the world, the young adult scifi author has mostly vanished from prominence.

Prior to 1949, scifi writers used a lot of other variant terms for humans from Earth. E.E. Smith, who Heinlein admired and listed as his single biggest influence (and from who Heinlein got the idea of space marines in power armor, an idea the Old Man used in Starship Troopers), used the term Tellurian to refer to humans from Earth in the Lensman novels, as Earth in his future era was known as Tellus, an erudite term for a god of Earth in Greek Myth used in Hamlet. Humanoids in the Lensman series were known as "Tellus-type lifeforms."

(You know, I feel like Tellurian for human and Tellus for Planet Earth should make a comeback.)