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August – 2017 – castaliahouse.com - Page 3

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This game. Oh, this game! I really didn’t expect it to be as nail-bitingly fun as it turned out to be. I certainly didn’t expect it to take over the weekly game night. But it did. Because this solitaire game really does get ten times as fun when you play it in two-player mode. It doesn’t […]

The streets run red with blood when a man known only as The Sellsword comes to the dying mining city of Aldreth. The advanced infirmity of the plague-ridden nominal ruler, Duke Owain, has opened the door for two rival wizards to vie for control of the city. The sorcerer Varlak has run things on the […]

In Selenoth, the race of Man is on the ascendant. The ancient dragons sleep. The ghastly Witchkings are no more; their evil power destroyed by the courage of Men and the fearsome magic of the Elves. The Dwarves have retreated to the kingdoms of the Underdeep, the trolls hide in their mountains, and even the […]

I recently pointed out how the moral element of pulp-style stories absolutely saturates them, driving not just the structure of their plots, but also defining the likability of the characters on a scene-by-scene basis. I would even go so far as to say that this is what makes old school pulpy thrills even possible. In […]

THE PROMETHEAN is a brutally funny novel exposing the utter insanity of modern academia and the world of technology. An extraordinary tale of ambition, social justice, and human folly, it combines the mordant wit of W. Somerset Maugham with a sense of humor reminiscent of P.G. Wodehouse. When American billionaire Henry Hockenheimer discovers that conquering the […]

Mass Effect: Andromeda is a failure. A massive failure. A failure so large, the company shuttered the “Mass Effect” series entirely and even shut down the studio that made it. You see… It only sold three million copies. Three. Million. Copies. Of a game that costs $60 apiece, and requires a $400+ piece of equipment […]

Pulp Revolution (Wasteland and Sky) To Pulp or Not to Pulp ~ A Review of Astounding Frontiers #1 and a Bonus! — “Keep in mind that there are no bad stories here. They’re all well written and do what they do well, but they are not Pulp stories aside from According to Culture. The reason they’re […]

The pulp ethos is a real thing. Some people think I just made it up or something. Or they think I’m being evasive when I refuse to define “pulp” as a distinct genre in its own right. Of course, not everyone wants to spend a solid year surveying a bunch of works that nobody is […]

D.A.W. Books was the bastion of sword and planet fiction in the 1970s. Donald Wollheim published Kenneth Bulmer as Alan Burt Akers, Lin Carter, John Norman etc. He also was willing to use new artists. One of those was Richard Hescox (born 1949) started out as a D.A.W Books cover artist but went on for […]

Cirsova Editor Alex Kimball has a great find from the May 1943 issue of Planet Stories: Jane, if the Vizigraph were but the length of one letter, yours would be printed! By golly, we’ve waited years for somebody to brag about our yarns, other than ourselves– and you’re our adopted fan club as of this […]

The thought that there are nowhere near as many good science fiction movies as there should be is one that I’ve had for a long time, probably since my teens, but it’s only recently that I decided to investigate it.  Certainly, everyone’s tastes are different, and we can quibble about the quality of individual pictures, […]

The second volume of Jasper T. Scott’s DARK SPACE UNIVERSE They left searching for answers from the cosmos and found an evil as old as time, Lucien, Garek, Addy, and Brak are all that’s left of the Inquisitor’s crew. Eight years ago they left the Etherian Empire aboard the Astralis with three hundred million scientists to learn the true […]