Love, Morality, and Ghosts

Sunday is October 1, and that can mean only one thing:

30 Days till Hallowe'en!

So, starting Monday, in addition to our five regular blognovel features, we'll be presenting three more stories especially for the season:

Bram Stoker's Dracula is a chilling tale of love through the ages. If you're familiar with the story from the films, you know that the dark Count isn't all that bad...just hard-done-by by fortune and centuries of solitude (see Gary Oldman's stunningly deep portrayal in Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula...if you can get past Keanu Reeves' accent :) )

Of course, he does drink blood. Lots of it. But we'll forgive him...right?

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus is an intense morality play. Told from the perspective of the monster, this tale of man-playing-God is really a reflection of the author's troubled soul coping with her stillborn child. The notion of creating life was such fascination for her, it modelled itself into a tale of horror and revenge (she feared, at various drug-induced times, the vengeance of her infant's soul on an unfit mother) that has become a staple in the horror canon.

If you haven't seen the Kenneth Branagh film featuring Robert De Niro as the monster, you really need to check it out. But read the book first!

Finally, we're throwing in Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." This is a short story, but we'll split it up over a few days to make it more compact. This is a genuinely classic piece of Americana, and will be sure to put a chill into your Hallowe'en.

By the way, we know that there were multiple copies of chapter VII of The Time Machine published yesterday. We were having some trouble with our Blogger connections, and every time we attempted to publish the chapter we lost connection. Apparently all of those attempts ended up being successful. We've corrected the problem, so no worries.

Happy reading!

New Chapter Updates

All five stories have been updated again for today.

Remember, we only update on weekdays, so if you missed seeing updates on Saturday and Sunday, it's because there weren't any. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz continues with Chapter 2 today.

New Novel Launched

Today we're thrilled to announce the long-awaited launch of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Apart from being source material for a groundbreaking film, this novel from 1900 is a spectacular work of fiction. It parallels in many aspects Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland -- most clearly in the young heroine's descent through some mishap (either falling down a hole or getting caught in a tornado) into a fantasy world of imagination. Both have to learn the ropes and the new rules of natural order in these strange lands.

It's a theme that runs through much of the great fairy literature of the 20th century; even C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia (which, regrettably, due to copyright restrictions we are unable to publish) provided an escape for otherwise bored children into a world just outside their own (in fact, the horror works of H.P. Lovecraft carry this idea through to a more frightening conclusion).

The fantasy works of J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings), while presuming to be historical, drew on a slightly different theme providing a teleological outline for the nobility of man in spite of the devastation wrought by two World Wars.

Escapism in late 19th- and early 20th-century speculative fiction provided a respite from the doldrums of industrial society, and later from the terrors of war.

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Yes, new chapters have also been added to our previous novels. Our ring is now complete! If you haven't had a chance yet, visit and bookmark the following stories:

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
• The Time Machine
• The War of the Worlds
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The Martians are Coming

Today marks the launch of our fourth serial blognovel feature: H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.

We're so accustomed to versions of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds being terribly technologically advanced...stemming, no doubt, from Orson Welles' notoriously successful radio drama rendering from 1938, the horrible Haskin film of 1953 (ok...it's a classic, but it's still cheesy as all-get-out by today's standards), and much more recently Spielberg's 2005 rendition starring Tom Cruise.

The liberties taken with these dramatic versions, however, cause the story to differ in several levels of significance from the book, which was written and set in the late 19th century -- the same insdustrial-age mechanical epoch as Wells' The Time Machine...an era when machinery drove the economy of the world, electricity was a new and mysterious energy source, and the very idea that there could still be something magical in the world beyond human understanding had not yet been revived as it would be in Haskin's age of radiation.

Readers will find Wells' text much less technical in its explanations of phenomena than the dramatized versions (remember, Welles' radio play was not a reading of the book, but a mock news report, while Haskin's interpretation, and its later tribute by Spielberg, has its own original features). It is a very human story, told with the practicality and matter-of-fact approach that punctuates all of Wells' writing.

Don't forget, Alice is still wandering around Wonderland (today she meets the Caterpillar!), Pierre Annorax is just about to sail aboard the Abraham Lincoln to investigate the monster of the deep, and the 'Time Traveller' has just returned from another journey. Tomorrow, Dorothy will encounter her famous cyclone, and we're dying with anticipation for the introduction of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Happy reading!

Three Tales of Travel

There is an accidental theme running through the first three of our serial blognovels this week: the theme of travel. This just occurred to me as I was posting the first chapter of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine this morning.

Of course, Alice has already begun her strange travels through Wonderland, and Pierre hasn't even left dry land yet. But one of the exciting things about reading (or re-reading) all these tales of adventure is that each takes us far and wide through the limitless bounds of imagination. In The Time Machine the traveller scarcely moves from the place he sits at the end of Chapter I, but his journey is no less miraculous, and Wells takes us to places that are just as wild, alien, and exotic as those experienced by Alice and Pierre.

'Curiouser' still is that the same thread follows through our next two features. The War of the Worlds brings distant travellers to our domain -- menacing though they may be -- while Dorothy's adventures in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz share with Alice a fantastical journey through a child's imagination.

A Pool of Tears, and the Launch of the Nautilus

Today's update:

Chapter II of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is now available.

We're also excited to announce that Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea has just launched. This monumental tome should keep us busy for quite some time -- 47 chapters in all! But it's just such a great adventure tale, we couldn't resist running it for you.

Happy reading!

Relaunch a spectacular success!

The relaunch of Serial Outerworlds has already been a spectacular success...so much so that we're changing the publishing schedule.

Instead of updating each story once a week, we'll be updating them daily. Readers will be able to look for new chapters of their favorite stories each and every weekday.

We will still be staggering the publications, however, so that this week Tuesday will launch Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Wednesday will begin The Time Machine, Thursday The War of the Worlds, and Friday The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Thanks to those new fans who have already made a point of visiting our sponsors, both here and on the Alice in Wonderland site. We're so excited about this process we can barely contain ourselves...it's going to be tough keeping the Hallowe'en and Christmas offerings a surprise...

...but we'll manage.

Serial Outerworlds Relaunches

Serial Outerworlds is pleased to announce its relaunch.

After nearly a year on hiatus (due largely to time constraints), Serial Outerworlds is coming back online. To mark this relaunch, we're running a special series of classic novels from the world of speculative fiction. We will, of course, be offering original fiction once again (probably after the New Year), and offering the same publishing terms to new authors we had previously.

For now we'll be running five novels in serial format. Each novel will be updated with a new chapter every week, and will be updated on a different day of the week. This pattern may change by reader suggestion, but for now we'll give this update scheme a try.

The novels we're currently running are as follows:

Alice in Wonderland (updates on Mondays)
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (updates on Tuesdays)
The Time Machine (updates on Wednesdays)
The War of the Worlds (updates on Thursdays)
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (updates on Fridays)

All of these novels are in the public domain.

We have many more novels at our disposal now, and plan to run as many as we can as part of our growing network of serialized blognovels. We're even planning a special Hallowe'en "triple threat" for the month of October that classic horror fans won't want to miss!

As this is our relaunch, it's probably a good time to remind readers that our only source of revenue comes from clicks on the Google ads you see on each blog. Visiting those sponsored links carries no obligation for you, but does provide us with a source of funding to keep up this work.

Visitors looking for content or updates can still email entries to their friends. We've also enabled the site feed, which your RSS reader can use to place short feeds on your website if you're looking for content (for all Serial Outerworlds blognovels, the feed address is the URL of the novel followed by /rss.xml, eg. http://serialouterworlds.blogspot.com/rss.xml).

Thanks again for being part of this exciting relaunch. We're looking forward to bringing you the best in sci-fi, fantasy, and horror over the coming months. Happy reading!