Tom Swift's Electrio-Gizmo Xmas Tree

Just in time for the holidays, I'd like to put you in contact with the greatest "Grampa" in the world (of audiobooks at the very least). Roy Trumbull is at the website The Story Spieler. I first ran across him while looking for audiobooks of L. Frank Baum's Oz series. He had a few on archive.org and felt that this guy is the perfect storm of children's storytelling. He's got the great wizened Grampa voice along with being able to read without stumbling, a strong presence and a broad yet always interesting choice of materials to pull from.

Through Roy I discovered Tom Swift. "Whatchew talkin' bout Willis?" you may ask since Tom Swift has been around for almost a hundred years now. Quite frankly it's just never been a frame of reference for me. I always thought of Tom Swift in the most abstract of terms, thinking it just some moralistic part of American folklore, like Jack Sprat or something. I had no idea there were several series of books and that they are scifi adventures like you might see in Jonny Quest or the pages of the pulps. Great big "duh" on me. Ah well, it's great to learn new things about old stuff.

Roy has put up a story called TOM SWIFT AND THE VISITOR FROM PLANET X which piqued my interest. A folksy abstract idea meeting a Planet Xian? HUH? OK so I obviously had to research Mr Swift some. I looked him up on wikipedia and stole the above image from a nice site with info on a lot of the books.

Download or listen to TOM SWIFT AND THE VISITOR FROM PLANET X at archive.org


I would like to wish everyone a happy and safe holiday season. Take it easy, be happy with your friends and family and think about how cool it would be to have world peace.

The Xmas tree from Planet X.