Monthly Archives:
sSUPERVERSIVE: Saturn Run by John Sandford and Ctein
Tuesday , 17, January 2017 Uncategorized 2 CommentsAs I think I’ve mentioned before, the miracle that is the Overdrive app and library audiobooks has let me be highly indiscriminate in terms of what I’m listening to at work. All caution essentially goes out the window, and unless I’ve got something on my waitlist available, I’ve made a habit of just picking up […]
Schuyler Hernstrom on Why Appendix N Started a Literary Movement
Monday , 16, January 2017 Appendix N Leave a comment“A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.” — Frank Herbert, Dune. There are many ways to look at Jeffro’s Appendix N series. The quest to better understand the roots of D&D started off innocently enough. I was following along, curious to see how authors like Jack […]
You may have noticed some new bloggers debuting here in the past couple of weeks… and there are so many getting on board, you may have missed one! Here they are: Jon Mollison: Welcome to the Tabletop Officer Training Corps, Recruit Scott Cole: Jakub Różalski’s 1920’s Eastern European Mechs Kevyn Winkless: Mind The Gap: Forgotten History of Science Fiction […]
This is a piece that I wrote 12 years ago for a collection of essays on Lin Carter with the horrible title of Apostle of Letters. Maybe 30 copies of the book were sold. There were some good essays in the book and some not so good essays. Anyway, I make the case there was […]
Bundle of Holding Tackles Adventurer Conqueror King System
Saturday , 14, January 2017 Tabletop Games 2 CommentsI have raved over this game quite a bit and with good reason: this is the system that gave me the old school D&D campaign of my dreams. Yes, it plays pretty well like my trusty Moldvay Basic Set I had back when I was twelve. No… the confusing rules, the missing rules, the rules that […]
Fake SciFi is ruining actual SciFi and here’s who’s to blame: Fake Science Fiction Writers. But first… a little background. Science fiction has always been a rather fragile affair. At times it has not had the significance it enjoys now. In fact, there were times when it was, for all practical purposes, dead. Just a […]
Short Reviews – Thieves’ Blueprint, by Ronal Kayser (as Dale Clark)
Friday , 13, January 2017 Book Review 2 CommentsThieves’ Blueprint by Ronal Kayser writing as Dale Clark appeared as the featured novelette in the March 1943 issue of G-Men Detective. Thieves’ Blueprint has almost everything you’d expect from a “hard boiled detective story”: a mystery that starts and ends with a dame, a couple of no goods up to no good, a murder, […]
Why Post-Christian Fantasy is Inferior to the Real Thing
Thursday , 12, January 2017 Comment 15 CommentsOver at First Things, Marc Barnes points out how the spiritual element of Star Wars was retconned away in the prequels: In the prequels, the Force is a part of the biological world. It is accessed not by the mind or spirit but by microscopic organisms. This view renders the Jedi religion superfluous—one either has a […]
Morale, Emotion, and a Defense of Limiting Player Autonomy
Thursday , 12, January 2017 Tabletop Games 4 CommentsLet me start by making a, perhaps, controversial statement: player autonomy should be limited and a lot of potential for fun resides in player limitation. It is often stated as a clear neophyte mistake for a Dungeon Master to tell players what their characters do. I agree with this as a general principal but, let’s […]
On Yanthus Prime, a femme fatale must turn cat burglar, teaming with an intelligent insect swarm to stay one step ahead of the Mob’s clutches. On Earth, a fighter pilot is kidnapped by an alien spaceship and forced to become an interstellar janissary. In a galaxy far away, a bulletproof thug tries to keep his space […]
Top book blogger Hooc Ott crashes yet another safe space in the comments on a post entitled pre- Le Guin SF Short Fic Reviews over at Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations blog. It turns out that, yes, being a fan of one of science fiction’s most beloved pulp authors is in fact triggering to certain […]
A List of Books Some Comic Book Writer Grew Up Loving
Friday , 13, January 2017 Jeffro Comment 17 CommentsPenguin books has long been synonymous with the classics. Just as one example, S. T. Joshi cited the Penguin classic edition of Lovecraft’s work as marking the pulp author’s ultimate canonization. But that was a long time ago– way back in 1999. I’m afraid, however, that Penguin is clearly losing their touch. Boing Boing has […]