Friday, December 18, 2009

The Harl Vincent race

A year ago, when I first started my one-blog Harl Vincent revival, the only story by Vincent available online was the Project Gutenberg etext of "Creatures of Vibration". By posting "Terrors Unseen" last December, I brought the number of stories up to two. Since then, a total of eighteen of Vincent's stories have appeared online, to wit:

July 26, 2007: Creatures of Vibration, Project Gutenberg
December 1, 2008: Terrors Unseen, Johnny Pez
March 13, 2009: High-Frequency War, Johnny Pez
April 26, 2009: Old Crompton's Secret, Project Gutenberg
May 19, 2009: The Copper-Clad World, Project Gutenberg
May 31, 2009: Microcosmic Buccaneers, Johnny Pez
June 21, 2009: The Terror of Air-Level Six, Project Gutenberg
July 5, 2009: Vulcan's Workshop, Project Gutenberg
July 6, 2009: Too Many Boards, Johnny Pez
July 14, 2009: Wanderer of Infinity, Project Gutenberg
August 13, 2009: The Barrier, Johnny Pez
August 18, 2009: Neutral Vessel, Johnny Pez
August 23, 2009: Silver Dome, Project Gutenberg
September 6, 2009: Vagabonds of Space, Project Gutenberg
September 13, 2009: The Golden Girl of Munan, Johnny Pez
October 3, 2009: The War of the Planets, Johnny Pez
December 16, 2009: Once in a Blue Moon, Johnny Pez
December 17, 2009: Gray Denim, Project Gutenberg

The current total thus stands at nine stories each. Technically, I suppose, Project Gutenberg has ten stories, since they posted their own etext of "Terrors Unseen" on the day I posted the final installment of "The War of the Planets", but I posted that story first, so I figure theirs doesn't count. At any rate, I can't help noticing that, perhaps by sheer coincidence, we've been keeping pace with each other in a pretty steady manner. If I didn't know any better, I'd think that someone at PG is keeping tabs on this blog, and posting a new Vincent etext whenever I post in order to keep our totals even.

So, as an experiment to test out this theory, I'm going to follow up "Once in a Blue Moon" right away by posting the next story in my queue, "Thia of the Drylands". I should finish posting it before Christmas, which will put me ahead ten stories to nine, and then we'll see whether PG responds with another Vincent etext of their own.

Stay tuned.

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