Balladeer’s Blog
Halloween Month rolls along here at Balladeer’s Blog with a repost of my 2014 review of a Washington Irving tale. Not The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but Irving’s sci-fi tale that deserves to be associated with Halloween at least as much as Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of War of the Worlds long ago.
Washington Irving giving us his sexiest come-hither stare.
THE MEN OF THE MOON (1809) – Several decades before H.G. Wells would use his fictional invasion from Mars in War of the Worlds as an allegorical condemnation of colonialism the American author Washington Irving beat him to it. In Irving’s work The Men of the Moon a technologically advanced race from the moon conquered the Earth and treated its inhabitants the way that European and Muslim colonialists often treated the indigenous inhabitants of the areas they subjugated.
Irving, with tongue-in-cheek, called his invaders from the moon “Lunatics” and depicted them as green-skinned humanoids with tails and one eye each instead of two. Continue reading
Yes, it’s another Top 20 for 2020 list! And it’s another one about failed predictions, this time from alleged psychics of long, long ago instead of the recent past. As always these bogus predictions are fun from a Flash Fiction angle.
*** The reign of the final Pope ever will come to a close in 2013. Since that is obviously wrong, these other predictions about O’Morgain’s Final Popes are wrong as well. 
Here at Balladeer’s Blog I’m about responding to you readers. Some of you responded very strongly to the way I sprinkled my reviews of Robert Ludlum’s Top Seven Novels with observations of what I would have liked to see in terms of offshoots or spin-off stories. So, since Expanded Universes are becoming all the rage in recent decades here’s an outline of my fan fiction-style view of an Expanded Robert Ludlum Universe. 
I. BEOWULF AGATE – Series of short stories or a made for cable series. The tales would be set from the 1950s to late 1970s, ending just before the events in The Matarese Circle. Ludlum’s fictional intelligence organization Consular Operations would take center stage.
II. OPERATION: MEDUSA – Another series of short stories or a made for cable series. Ludlum’s Operation: Medusa was his fictional version of the Vietnam War’s real-life Phoenix Project. Operation: Medusa was the top-secret, paramilitary Black Operations outfit in which David Webb aka Jason Bourne got his first covert experience. 
However, as the decades wore on and African Americans had greater opportunities open up to them many of them began making up their own minds about what political attitudes they would embrace and what political candidates they would support. This did not sit well with the Democratic Party’s power brokers and the nascent Liberal fanatics in their ranks. 
THE GALLOWS MAN – This is another neglected American horror legend which has been presented in many different versions over the years. Ralph Sutherland was born in 1702 in either New York City or a town near the Catskills, depending on the version. 
I. Jacques Morand – Roughly 300 years ago Jacques Morand was in love with Genevieve Parent. Unfortunately for him Genevieve decided to join a convent. When Morand could not change her mind through pleading he turned to threats, which drew warnings from Genevieve’s father and brothers. 
Balladeer’s Blog’s month-long celebration of Halloween continues … 
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