Monthly Archives:
sBerin Kinsman of Dancing Lights Press has written an extensive post that is relevant to one of the perennial debates of Appendix N discussion: does the Earthsea Trilogy belong on the list or not…? He points out that the setting “does not neatly map to any real-world places of history” and that though it “borrows Tolkien’s […]
Short Reviews will return next week with Ross Rocklynne’s “The Bubble Dwellers”. I recently tore myself away from the pulps and my own Appendix N reading to check out Torchship by Karl Gallagher. The book has come out to rave reviews, including Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets Seal of Approval with “a platinum star with diamond […]
A. Merritt’s role in the development Lovecraft’s Mythos stories is well known. Indeed, “The Call of Cthulhu” is pretty much a direct answer to Merritt’s “The Moon Pool”. You hear very little about him among science fiction fans, however. Just in general, they tend to look back on John Campbell’s work as more or less being the birth of […]
Last week, China Mieville’s latest novel debuted: This Census-Taker. I was surprised to discover this, as I thought his King Rat, The City and The City and Embassytown were notable and strong outliers of the past decade in an otherwise generally weakening genre. From the description: In a remote house on a hilltop, a lonely […]
RETROSPECTIVE: The Face in the Abyss by A. Merritt
Wednesday , 20, January 2016 Appendix N 3 CommentsWhat is it that makes weird fiction so weird…? One factor that played into it was that people in the opening decades of the twentieth century might think you weren’t normal if you liked that sort of thing. A “regular guy” like Edgar Rice Burroughs didn’t feel comfortable having his name associated with A Princess […]
Over the holidays, my dad and I had the opportunity to both finish Avalon Hill’s Air Assault on Crete and try out the accompanying Invasion of Malta mini-game. Crete wrapped up with a very narrow Allied Victory. Malta has proved to be… frustrating for the Germans. In Crete, I managed to just barely evacuate enough […]
Across the Line: MPAA Jargon as the Key to Great Gaming
Tuesday , 19, January 2016 Uncategorized 4 CommentsGame designer S. John Ross had a flash of insight when he went to the movies this past weekend: I noticed that one movie had a PG-13 rating for including “brief teen partying.” Another threatened both “crude humor” and “thematic elements.” Someone needs to collect MPAA jargon into a d100 table to be used as […]
I’ve read a lot of science fiction in my life, and there tend to be some words I love hearing to describe a book I’m about to pick up. (“Space opera” ranks high among them.) On the other hand, there are also some words I dread hearing attached to a scifi novel. Words that, really, […]
Amazon reduced the KU payment again in December 2015, from .0049 per page in November to .0046 per page. That means the breakeven point for the average $4.99 Castalia House book is now 733 pages. That is down nearly 21 percent from July 2015, when it was .0058 per page and the breakeven was 579 […]
Guest Post by Misha Burnett: Tanith Lee’s Tales Of The Flat Earth
Monday , 18, January 2016 Appendix N, Appendix X 7 CommentsEditor’s note: I am pleased to be introducing Misha Burnett here at Castalia House. He is one of several “usual suspects” that have had a great deal to say in the many discussions about fantasy I’ve participated in the past few years. You can find more about his books and commentary over at his blog— and […]
Sensor Sweep: Lovecraft’s Terror, Damon Knight’s Charity, the Great Rewriting, and Dour-faced Old Men
Monday , 18, January 2016 Sensor Sweep 4 CommentsThe Pulps (Cirsova) Quick Musings on the Depiction of Women in Science Fiction — “I can’t remember the names of all the bad black and white sci-fi flicks from the 50s I’ve watched with my dad, but for some reason while Hollywood was content to again and again show us shrieking lady scientists who are […]
REVIEW: Dark Conspiracy (by Lester W. Smith/GDW)
Monday , 18, January 2016 Book Review, Game Design, Games, Tabletop Games 4 CommentsDark Conspiracy (published by the Games Designer’s Workshop, or GDW, in 1991, by Lester W. Smith) was a grim action/horror RPG set in a dystopian future where evils of all kinds plague the globe. This one came out when I was in college. The Gulf War had kicked off, if I recall correctly, and GDW had (or […]