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sGood Game Masters write their own stuff; great GM’s STEAL. SO LET’S TALK STEALING! He-Man is what you’d get if you crossed Conan with Shazaam (aka DC’s Captain Marvel): a muscled, superhero barbarian that a muscled, but mild-mannered Prince Adam turns into thanks to a magic sword. The main character of He-Man and the Masters […]
JUST RELEASED: Death Be Not Proud by Suzannah Rowntree
Monday , 3, April 2017 Just Released Leave a commentMoonshine liquor, jazz-fuelled dancing, and the risk of a police raid—these are all in a night’s work for cabaret singer Ruby Black. But when a rugby star mistakes her for a dead girl, Ruby’s life threatens to become briefer and more exciting than she bargained for. Two years ago, schoolgirl Wu Xue Bai was brutally […]
SENSOR SWEEP: Educated Aliteracy, Bold Choices, Intellectual Cotton Candy, and Overwhelming Strength
Monday , 3, April 2017 Sensor Sweep 18 CommentsCulture (The Walrus) The Rising Tide of Educated Aliteracy — “By this point host Jian Ghomeshi was driven to make a joke about the situation: ‘I’m glad we populated the panel for Canada Reads with a bunch of people who don’t read.’ What sorts of arguments, he wondered, would the panelists be making in defense of […]
The Castalia House blog hit 101,343 pageviews in March. That’s the first time it has exceeded 100k pageviews in a month. And that’s up from the previous record of 76,551 the month before. I’d like to say “thank you” to all the the bloggers, authors, linkers, tweeters, readers, and commenters that made this happen. So: […]
REVIEW: War of the Ruby by Brian K. Lowe
Sunday , 2, April 2017 Pulp Revolution, Short Fiction 25 CommentsI’ve held off on turning a critical eye towards Cirsova magazine for several reasons. For one thing, I’d be crazy to say anything bad about the project. P. Alexander is a friend, sure. One of the few people to pay attention to me in those weird days of 2015 when sitting at my lunch table […]
Sam J. Lundwall’s (born 1941) Science Fiction: What It’s All About was an Ace paperback from 1971. Lundwall is a native of Sweden who had a few novels published in the U.S. by Donald Wollheim first at Ace and then at D.A.W. The book is presented as a sort of beginner’s guide of getting some […]
An all new Geek Gab is here and it’s loaded with all manner of geeky gabbishness! Listen in to hear all about Ghost in the Shell and Scarlett Johansson, Robert E. Howard and Weird Westerns, Joseph Campbell and godawful fantasy, the OSR and Pulp Revolution, D&D and the lengths Dungeon Masters will go to give […]
Give me your bland, your depressing, your alienating– your unceasing agony as you yearn to depart from life…! Seriously, who decided that despair is the default setting for “literary”? Who decided that ineffectuality is the starting point for “thoughtful”? And gosh, I know everyone has had their share of hard knocks over the years. But for the life of me […]
Castalia House has put in a good showing at this year’s Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance Book of the Year Award, taking both first and third place. Peter Grant takes the prize with Brings the Lightning. Congrats, Peter! (For behind-the-scenes details about how the book was put together, check out Scott Cole’s interview with Peter here.) Second […]
I’m hesitant to review this show, because anyone who tries to find it is in for a lot of frustration. It’s unbelievably obscure. I saw it on a Chicago television station when I was a kid. I spent years searching for it, and came up with nothing but a few tantalizing hints. I don’t remember […]
Fairy Stories and Beyond Baum’s Wizard of Oz
Saturday , 1, April 2017 Authors, Before the Big Three, Fiction 21 Comments“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” – C.S. […]
GUEST POST: How Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Frank Miller Ruined Comics by Jon Del Arroz
Tuesday , 4, April 2017 Jeffro Comics, Comment 66 CommentsJust as Science Fiction and Fantasy underwent fundamental transformations in the 1980s and beyond, the comic industry also pushed itself further and further into niche territory. It’s gone from books selling in the millions of copies to a new normal where now a few thousand people read a book. The gatekeepers of comicdom blame the […]