Going through old papers I find this gem from my Randian past: a very short sf story that I wrote in (but not for) college, titled “Under the Violet Sun.”
Some of my stories actually had plots (hopefully I’ll dig them up eventually). This one, not so much.
Ludwig Boltzmann
Three more blasts from the past (all a bit more recent than my blast from Oscarville):
First, two papers I wrote for a science course in college: “The Temptation of Ludwig Boltzmann” (a short sf story exploring the implications of Boltzmannian probability theory – though Amazon thinks it’s something else) and “Evolution: Chance or Teleology?” (an essay on the spontaneous growth of physical order).
Next, a blast from my statist past: “Financing the Non-Coercive State,” an essay I wrote in (though not for) grad school, in which I decisively refute free-market anarchism!
In 1972, when I was eight, I wrote a series of stories (or four “books” – 186 pages’ worth, though typed up and without the original drawings they come to a mere 25 pages total) collectively titled Oscar of Oscarville, about an eight-year-old boy who flew around on the back of an enormous hummingbird while whacking off the heads of monsters with his enchanted sword, in a magical land whose chief characteristic seemed to be the elicitation of various sorts of gigantism in everything from bats and butterflies to houses and hair tonic. (I then had no idea that there were actual places named Oscarville – in Alaska and Georgia, for example.) This was my magnum opus up to that point.
I hadn’t seen the Oscarville stories since 1981 and had feared they were lost, until I rediscovered them going through old boxes last week. As a break from more pressing but less enjoyable work, I’ve transcribed Oscar’s adventures and self-indulgently put them online. Lo, he is risen!
Did you know that when there’s gloom in the gloaming, that’s when doom goes a-roaming? I recently dug up five chapters of a planned, but mercifully uncompleted, fantasy novel I was writing in high school. It was hopelessly derivative (my ringwraiths were called, um, ringlords), but hey, I was fifteen or thereabouts.
Feast your eyes on the deathless literary milestone that is Druidstone Quest: The Sword of the Highlands! 😮
I recently came across a story (if that’s the right word for it) that I wrote when I was around nine years old. It presents itself as being part of a series, but I have no idea whether I wrote any of the other installments listed.
Anyway, it’s called The History of the World! and it’s … kinda strange.