Monthly Archives:
sReview: The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Volume 1, 2009-2011
Sunday , 7, February 2016 Book Review 2 CommentsThe internet has given us new venues for fiction. The publishers had turned their back on the genre but fans brought it back in a new electronic form. I can remember some early sites in the late 1990s. One had the name of “Temple of the Scarlet Salamander” or something like that. In the 00s, […]
SENSOR SWEEP: Existential Dread, Victorian Fictions, Tradition Defying Geniuses, and the Jaded Old Debauchee
Friday , 5, February 2016 Sensor Sweep 8 CommentsPink Slime Watch (Black Gate) Despair All The Way Down: The Illearth War by Stephen R. Donaldson — “The Illearth War is a story steeped in existential dread. Both inaction and action in the face of soul-crushing evil seem to lead to disastrous ends. To believe or not to believe? To fight or not to fight? […]
Short Reviews – Formula for Conquest, James R. Adams
Friday , 5, February 2016 Book Review 2 CommentsFormula for Conquest by James R. Adams appeared in the Fall 1945 issue of Planet Stories. James R. Adams is not very good at writing dialogue. By the third page, narrator Tod Mulhane had thrice referred to himself as a “soldier of fortune”, and when he gave his background speech that spent a paragraph more […]
RETROSPECTIVE: “Friend Island” by Francis Stevens
Thursday , 4, February 2016 Before the Big Three 3 CommentsIn this short story published in All-Story Weekly in 1918, Gertrude Barrows Bennett depicts an imaginary future where women have become the “world’s ruling sex”. If the story hadn’t spoken of an “elder time when woman’s superiority to man had not been so long recognized”, I would have been inclined to say that this was […]
We’re looking for a few good RSS feeds. I love a good wargaming post. Even better, I like it when wargamers come out from their fora and private social media, and write stuff where regular people are liable to come across it. If you know of a great wargaming site that belongs in this round […]
One of the hardest and most worthwhile elements of Wargaming, indeed the part that never stops, is developing a mastery of the intricacies. Learning a new Wargame might be done in a few days, but getting to the point where you can manipulate the forces under your control, develop them, and predict their interaction with […]
Way before the Borg burst onto the Next Generation Trek series, Star Fleet Battles had the Andromedans. These mysterious alien invaders from another galaxy had never been witnessed in the flesh. Their boarding parties were made up of robots, so they are known primarily by their ships which operate on entirely different technologies than the more […]
I’m sure we all know that being a reader means you have piles of books sitting around that you’ve been meaning to get to. Which, of course, doesn’t mean that you stop getting books. The pile just keeps getting bigger, and you, being the avid reader, just keep grabbing more books. Why am I talking […]
Guest Post by Misha Burnett: Nifft The Lean by Michael Shea
Monday , 1, February 2016 Appendix X, Book Review 6 CommentsHell And Back Again: Michael Shea’s Nifft The Lean Michael Shea’s Nifft The Lean was originally published in 1982, and it won the World Fantasy Award for best novel in 1983. I remember reading it sometime in the 1980s (my 20s) and being amazed by the world building and the striking blend of horror and […]
RETROSPECTIVE: Part One of “The Citadel of Fear” by Francis Stevens
Monday , 1, February 2016 Before the Big Three 6 CommentsThis is a truly weird piece of fiction. It pretty well has everything: pulpy adventurers, remote and exotic locations, a mythical city that is a plausible real world Elfland, monsters, terrors, encounters with gods, and– finally!– a mysterious moth-girl worthy of a particularly lurid pulp cover. This is light years ahead of Francis Steven’s first […]