Thursday, September 6, 2007

Some thank yous, and the future of Prehistoric Pulp!

I just got around to realizing that a few days back, Brian over at Laelaps chose Prehistoric Pulp as one of his five favorite blogs. It's a big honor for me and I just wanted to give him a very belated thank you. Any readers who love natural history and paleontology must put Laelaps on their favorites list -- his posts are some of the best reading on the subjects you will find, either in print or on the web.

The nature of Prehistoric Pulp, being mostly reviews and news, doesn't always allow me to properly thank other bloggers who mention this site. There have been several, from Biology in Science Fiction to Robert J. Sawyer to Cryptomundo to The Esoteric Science Resource Center. Check out the blog roll to the right for a more complete list, because there are several other bloggers I want to thank.

This almost sounds like a goodbye post, but it's not. I just wanted to give you a little update about where this blog is heading. I'm roughly three-fourths of the way through my collection of paleo-literature. I have some catching up on reading to do, and I still have a lot of reviews to crank out, but at some point my posts will become less frequent simply because there is a finite amount of fiction relating to dinosaurs and prehistoric animals.

Ironically, if I wrote about books set in outer space, or even fiction concerning dragons rather than dinosaurs, I would probably have enough material to update at least on a weekly basis. Also, I admittedly limited myself by not reviewing caveman romances such as Clan of the Cave Bear. (Paleoanthropology has never appealed to me the same way as paleontology, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me.) Prehistoric Pulp will continue even after I've read every work of paleo-fiction in my library -- it will just be updated three or four times a month rather than three or four times a week. Usually only one or two novels about dinosaurs and other extinct animals are published in a single year, so news about the paleo-fiction is slow. More than anything, I want the blog to be a library of information about stories concerning paleontology so they are not forgotten even if I didn't care for them. (Remember readers, it is perfectly OK to disagree with my reviews in the comments section -- I even encourage it.)

As far as the more immediate future, I'm hoping to start a series of "theme weeks" soon. There will be a Dinotopia week, a King Kong week, and a mammoth week. How soon they will come will depend on how quickly I can catch up on my reading -- my personal life has been pretty busy lately, so I haven't had as much time to devote to my hobbies as I usually do.

Stay tuned!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much for the kind words and the plug, Walt. I was thinking the other day that you should expand Prehistoric Pulp to cover movies as well. It would add only so much to your queue, but I'd love to see your take on some of the movie-cheese of years past featuring dinosaurs and other critters.

Marek said...

Hi,

I just wanted to drop you a line and say that I think a Dinotopia week would be a great idea! I got into those books when I was fairly young, and for some reason have never been able to shake the fascination they hold.

Thanks!

Loler
www.cafepress.com/trilobite <- for all your prehistoric clothing needs!

DoubleW said...

The thought has occurred to me to cover dinosaur movies, but the reason I focused on fiction was because it is easy to find reviews of nearly every movie ever made on the internet. I wanted to focus on prehistoric fiction in print, with reviews of books and games much harder to come by.

I am still trying to decide whether to review video games about dinosaurs -- it would break my "only in print" rule, but it might be interesting given the large number of games I've played.

Anonymous said...

Hey, take your time, and don't be surprised if you find yourself back here sooner than you thought. I'm honestly amazed at the amount of dinosaur-related fiction out there from the last seventy years or so...and there's no reason why you can't review art books as well.

Anonymous said...

Personally, I like Paleoanthropology (caveman books) a little better than paleontology (dinosaur books) myself. This excellent blog has made me think I should try something similar. After all, they're not ALL romances! ;)