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sBro, Do You Even Read: The Movie
Friday , 24, February 2017 Appendix N, Before the Big Three, Pulp Revolution 64 CommentsThere’s bit of a push right now for some of us to moderate our tone. The fear is that we’re going drive away potential readers… at the very time when this blog is having it’s best month ever in terms of traffic. The concern is that we might lose our rep for being builders… at […]
Review – The Adventure of the Incognita Countess
Friday , 24, February 2017 Uncategorized Leave a commentI received a free physical review copy of The Adventure of the Incognita Countess by Cynthia Ward from Aqueduct Press. In the aftermath of the Anglo-Martian war, Lucy Harker, the half-vampire daughter of Mina Harker and Dracula, is an agent for the British government who has been sent on-board the Titanic to make sure that […]
The Big Three… Catastrophic Errors
Friday , 24, February 2017 Appendix N, Before the Big Three, Pulp Revolution 41 CommentsCampbellian Science Fiction stories—alternately “men with screwdrivers” or Blue SF—are provably inferior to the Fantasy & Science Fiction stories of the Pulps. Campbell is the Silver Age, the Pulps the Golden Age. This is not because the writers and editors of the Silver Age sucked. They had talent, skill, and imagination in abundance. Unfortunately, what […]
Privateers and Gentlemen (by Jon Williams) is like a Marine’s rifle – there are many Napoleonic naval miniature war games like it, but this one is mine. I played the heck out of it back in the ’90s. Well, at least I played the Heart of Oak naval miniatures portion of it. What got short […]
Bradford Walker has more information on the relatively obscure Fang of the Sun Dougram, the “lost” inspiration to BattleTech: It is a happy accident that the people behind BattleTech put in all the hard SF that they did, from technologies to politics, because it turns out that Dougram itself is a nigh-seamless fit into the […]
In the wake of the Death Star’s destruction in 1977, a renewed hunger for space opera swept across not just the United States, but the entire world. In Japan, this demand was met by such classics as Mobile Suit Gundam and Super Dimension Fortress Macross, as well as a slew of imitators. But the crown […]
Q: What is the most important thing in storytelling? A: The storytelling. Period. Any other answer is sheerest nonsense.
Used to I’d know if I was on the right track because I’d start getting a lot of flak. Not anymore! The low grade hostility and the suppression fire of snide remarks, sneering, and pedantic nitpicking just don’t cut it anymore. When it was just a collection of blog posts, the other side could still dismiss what […]
As follow ups to NATO: The Next War In Europe, my dad and I broke out two VERY different WW3 game to try out. The first was The Red Storm. This game simulates the first big push into West Germany and towards the Low Countries and France’s border, though it does so on a much […]
I guess it all goes back to the Shogun Warriors. And sure Gobots and Transformers were a full fledged craze in their own right. The fact that Robotech had an actual storyline (butchered as it was) was mind-blowing in and of itself. But if you were playing giant robot games at the tabletop during the […]
I come by my love of speculative fiction honestly: my parents. They both like and appreciate Science Fiction– and fantasy, to a lesser extent– and are actually fairly big consumers of Sci-Fi television and movies. Neither are what I’d call a nerd, exactly, but neither are they really mundanes. And maybe that’s why I find […]
Come children, let me tell you a tale… There was once an age, a Golden Age, an age of wonder and delight, of adventure and heroics, of creativity and imagination unbound… an age undreamt of by modern man, an age forgotten and buried, like hidden treasures beneath the sands of Ægypt. And into this Golden […]