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sImagine you were a Yankee and had to visit your family who are in the South. One day during your visit, you were told about a great town which is said to be the heart of the South. After hearing so much praise you were like, “Hey, this town I keep hearing about is just […]
Regular readers of this blog are certainly familiar with the creeping sense of realization one frequently encounters when reading works written after 1940. Who among us hadn’t become all too familiar with the bait-and-switch tactic used to sell expressly anti-western civilizational works of fantasy and science fiction to an unsuspecting public? It is one of […]
ON THE TABLE: Space Empires 4X, 3-player Short Game with Advanced Rules
Tuesday , 30, May 2017 Tabletop Games 3 CommentsThis game has been tough to get back on the table. “Real” wargamers tend to not touch space games. Euro gamers cannot handle the unmitigated direct conflict. Role-players have the luxury of just kicking back, rolling some dice, and watching where everything leads; their multi-year continuous campaigns leave them no time for space battles. Microgamers […]
What is it that makes awesome things start to suck? Star Wars, Star Trek, Western Civilization… I mean, there’s the Sickboy Theory—“At one time, you’ve got it, and then you lose it, and it’s gone forever.”—but that’s a mere description, not a cause, and it refers to people, not TV series or movie franchises. Though, […]
Over at the OD&D Discussion boards, things have (predictably) begun to heat up. The intensity of the response is so baffling, it has prompted this question from the forum denizen known as The Perilous Dreamer: Would someone fill me in on why there is so much hate for jeffro and for this book, because I […]
SENSOR SWEEP: Hilarious Deconstructions, Native Delicacies, Sexist Crybabies, and Railroady Totalitarianism
Monday , 29, May 2017 Sensor Sweep 11 CommentsMovies (Seagull Rising) The Rock of Bronze — “Maybe I’m reading it wrong, but what I read between the lines there is that the production team is planning one of those ‘hilarious’ deconstructions. This isn’t a case of making a perfect specimen of mankind and then giving him the glaring weakness of having zero social skills, […]
You know, it was always a bit of a mystery to me why it was that Appendix N discussion seemed to arbitrarily evaporate several years ago. Just like it was strange to me when the audience for my material turned out to be much more the sort of people that were looking for decent fantasy […]
Sandford (Sandy) Kossin (born 1926) is a general illustrator producing many paperback covers and movie posters from the 1950s through the 1970s. He painted some science fiction paperbacks from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. For a brief time, he was the house artist for Signet/New American Library line of sword and sorcery novels […]
E.E. Smith: The Doc Is In
Saturday , 27, May 2017 Before the Big Three, Book Review, Fiction 17 CommentsLast week was #SpaceOperaWeek, so I’m a bit late to the party. Still, any time is a good time for space opera! Being a relative newcomer to both Appendix N and the pulps is a mixed bag. On the one hand, oh man – what an embarrassment of riches! Of what I’ve been able to […]
“I, the One” is a short story in an etheric reality where souls are hunted, captured, consumed and willpower distinguishes the strong from the weak.
Short Reviews – Referent, by Ray Bradbury (as Brett Sterling)
Friday , 26, May 2017 Uncategorized 5 CommentsReferent, by Ray Bradbury writing under the shared pseud Brett Sterling, appeared in the October 1948 Issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. The October 1948 issue ends on a bizarre note with another Ray Bradbury short (this time under the pseud Brett Sterling). Referent features a boy in a sort of educational crèche colony; some sort […]