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Dead, but Still Kicking
Do you believe in spirits?
Paul Sochaczewski travels to Indonesia, Myanmar, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland to speak with mediums, shamans, and, yes, spirits of dead folks. In this innovative work of personal journalism, Sochaczewski—a self-described Agnostic Spiritualist—creates the Three Tenets of Spiritualism. He gets a personal mandate from Moses, speaks with Alfred Russel Wallace about his relationship with Charles Darwin, gets frustrated by conflicting messages given by Wallace’s assistant Ali, encounters a female vampire ghost who wants to follow him home (it’s his own fault), converses with nature spirits, and is invited on a date with the Mermaid Queen of Java.
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Almost a Knight to Remember
Almost a Knight to Remember I rather liked being called “Sir Paul.” © Paul Spencer Sochaczewski 2025 CAN’T-TELL-YOU-WHERE, Soon-To-Be-Nation of Savantis I turned down a knighthood. It was a tough decision — I liked the sound of “Sir Paul.” In the early 1990s I replied to a notice in the International Herald Tribune that offered […]
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Intro to a speculative biography of Ali
Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird Intro to a speculative biography of Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace’s assistant in the Malay Archipelago Consider Alfred Russel Wallace’s iconic hero’s journeys, exceptional even by the standards of other intrepid 19th-century British explorers. In 1848, Wallace and his friend Herbert Walter Bates said, in […]
Alfred Russel Wallace and Things That Go Bump in the Night
Alfred Russel Wallace is best known for his scientific achievements — collecting and documenting hundreds of new species of “natural productions,” major insights into biogeography, island endemism, and cultural anthropology, and notably, his development of a theory of evolution by natural selection independently of and prior to that of Charles Darwin. But Wallace was also […]
Enhancing the Narrative
A historian quickly learns there is little absolute truth. The authors of personal memoirs and observer narratives enhance, misremember (sometimes deliberately), censor, and leave out chunks of information.
Rarely, though, do historians try to go beyond the facts and speculate on the emotions, intentions, and psychological motivations of their research subjects.
As a fun exercise, I’ve created several “imagined conversations” between Alfred Russel Wallace and his assistant Ali, based on tidbits of information and provocative clues found in Wallace’s narratives.