Monthly Archives:
sThis is an awesome, awesome show loaded with commentary, discussion, analysis, and speculation. We mention a great many blog posts as we cruise through this, so to help you keep up, here’s a roundup: Jon Mollison’s comment on Pulp Nova from over on Google+ John C. Wright’s Ugly and the Beast My post on The Pulps […]
Forgotten Sword and Sorcery Artists: Michael Leonard
Sunday , 30, April 2017 Uncategorized 4 CommentsWhen you think of 1960s covers to paperback sword and sorcery books, Frank Frazetta and Jeff Jones immediately come to mind. Those were the titans, especially Frazetta. It took Jeff Jones a few years to really hit his stride. There was another artist who painted covers for sword and sorcery fiction in the late 1960s: […]
Certain writers evoke a time and place in an especially vivid manner. To the point that a reader gains a genuine sense of familiarity with a setting completely alien to his own experience. Its sights, sounds, and way of life. One might imagine this is the province of serious dramas, but I have come across it […]
THE FANTASY AND FURRY-IOUS: Xanadu, the comic book series Back in the long ago days of the late 1980s, a black-and-white comic book series appeared on comic shop shelves. Xanadu, written and illustrated by Vicky Wyman, was a cross between Rafael Sabatini-type adventure and romance and Ray Harryhausen-style fantasy and magic. The plot was both […]
It’s happened before. I get an old solitaire module for Tunnels & Trolls. I try it three times and get brutally destroyed very quickly every time. Then I run it for one of my kids and they just go through it like it’s nothing. Naked Doom is especially brutal, though. It opens up with your character […]
I recently mused on Twitter that Jack Vance may be my favorite Appendix N author, despite the fact that none of his books that I’ve read so far would likely top my favorites list. I’ve explored this ambivalence in the past, in other dimensions, and for the most part it still holds. Still, I’m finding that […]
Okay, this is a really great show. I find it absolutely fascinating how people can have such completely different understandings of role-playing games even when they’re are more or less working from the same reference points. Getting these sorts of perspectives side by side and in conversation with each other is awesome. One funny bit, though: […]
Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Keeper Rulebook Chapter 2: H. P. Lovecraft
Friday , 28, April 2017 Appendix N 10 CommentsThis chapter contains an absolutely first rate retrospective on Lovecraft’s works. And when the authors write that “Lovecraft is recognized as being one of the foremost horror writers of the twentieth century,” there are no ifs, buts, caveats, or footnotes. It is absolutely refreshing to have this stated so plainly. And I have not seen a […]
Short Reviews – Date Line by Noel Loomis (as Benj. Miller)
Friday , 28, April 2017 Short Fiction 2 CommentsDate Line by Noel Loomis appeared in the October 1948 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories and is the first in the Orig Prem series. I’ve read stories that have made me think “Wow, this seems like it probably inspired an episode of the Twilight Zone” and stories that have made me think “Wow, this seems […]
THROWBACK SF THURSDAY: The Narrow Land by Jack Vance
Thursday , 27, April 2017 Appendix N 7 CommentsI wrote a response to PC Bushi’s review of At the Earth’s Core over at Every Day Should Be Tuesday. The Narrow Land is a collection of six short stories and one novella by Jack Vance. This was my first exposure to Vance after The Dying Earth. What it doesn’t have is the magic […]
Black Gate has a great post up about Famous Fantastic Mysteries, an anthology drawn from the magazine that kept the classics of the early days of fantasy and science fiction in print with top flight covers that could rival the likes of Margaret Brundage and Frank Frazetta. Put together in 1991, it represents an extremely good […]
Robert Ervin Howard was an incredibly prolific writer, and produced a bibliography so full as to make those of us with limited reading time weep.[1] Some modern (and not so modern) critics have apparently dismissed Howard as a kind of idiot savant who was able to succeed despite his lack of education and training mainly […]