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Sunday, January 1, 2006

Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle Now Online

The tenth installment of the Tom Swift adventures, Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle, is now posted in the Tom Swift and His Pocket Library archive. As usual, HTML, PDF, PDA eReader, and plain ASCII text editions suitable for reading off- or online are available. These original Tom Swift books date from the early 20th century (this volume was published in 1911) and contain ethnic terms and dialect which were unremarkable at the time but deemed politically incorrect in our hyper-sensitive age. This volume attains an entirely different order of magnitude of offensiveness to modern urban weenies by the appearance of a firearm in the title, its subtitle: “Daring Adventures in Elephant Land”, and the action-packed plot in which our hero and his chums travel to darkest Africa and slaughter elephants, two twenty-five foot pythons (and I didn't think they had any feet!), Cape buffaloes, rhinoceroses, a lion, and, on the voyage to Africa, a whale—a whale! I know some parents whose heads would probably explode if they caught their kids reading such an exemplar of what was considered a wholesome adventure yarn for boys almost a century ago. Enjoy!

Posted at January 1, 2006 20:40