Monthly Archives:
sSensor Sweep: Savage Sword, Tanith Lee, Fritz Leiber, Greyhawk
Monday , 27, July 2020 Sensor Sweep 1 CommentTolkien (Scifi Scribe): If you want to create a high fantasy game that is in the same vein as Tolkien and checks off all those “woke” boxes you so desperately want to check off, you can easily do so without using any of the characters or places in his classic work. It isn’t that hard […]
The Equalizer was my favorite T.V. series of the 1980s. The basis of the show was Robert McCall (Edward Woodward), a spy, calls it quits and decides to help people in trouble. Set in 1980s New York City, it was the anti-Miami Vice. It was dark, gritty, and infused with a Cold War paranoia. No […]
With the recent publishing of Mortu and Kyrus stories in The Eye of Sounnu and The Penultimate Men, let us revisit the first, “Mortu and Kyrus in the White City.” “Come then, try my steel and I will send you to hell where you belong. The gods of my people look down upon those that […]
Science Fiction and Fantasy New Releases: 25 July, 2020
Saturday , 25, July 2020 Uncategorized 1 CommentUncover professional wizards, generation colony ships, heroes from another world, and buried alien starships in this week’s new releases. Dragontiarna: Defenders – Jonathan Moeller The realm of Andomhaim reels beneath the invasion of Warlord Agravhask, and Ridmark stands in his path. Ridmark knows that Agravhask is only the servant of the mighty Warden of Urd […]
This is a guest post by Richard who has contributed a few pieces before: Edward Frankland’s Forgotten Masterpiece There can be few people these days familiar with the work of Edward Frankland (1884-1958). And even amongst this minority far fewer still will be conversant with his 1932 novel of Viking Westmorland entitled HUGE AS […]
Sensor Sweep: Viking Bikers From Hell, Lovecraft & Hemingway, Hadon of Ancient Opar
Monday , 20, July 2020 Sensor Sweep 1 CommentT.V. (Bare Bone E-zine): But Milius’ mark on Sutter’s creative process may go far beyond simple story and dialogue. A more concrete clue lies in Milius’ end credits when Miami Vice scenes and the superimposed B-movie episode title “Viking Bikers from Hell,” pseudonymously written in 1987 by Milius, flash across the screen with other clips […]
The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly III
Sunday , 19, July 2020 Book Review, Short Fiction 1 CommentEvery two years, a new Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly volume is out. I reviewed Volume 1 in 2016, Volume II in 2018. The Best of Heroic Fantasy III covers 2013-2015. Format is trade paperback. Cover is classic sword and sorcery by Robert Zoltan, 289 pages of text with a few end pages on Kickstarter […]
First published in The Howard Collector, Spring 1967, “The Curse of the Golden Skull”, by Robert E. Howard, resembles a prose poem in the same vein as Clark Ashton Smith’s “Chinoiserie”. While there is a narrative thread throughout the short story, it does not, at first glance, map to conventional dramatic structure. The three sections, “The Curse of the […]
Science Fiction and Fantasy New Releases: 18 July, 2020
Saturday , 18, July 2020 Uncategorized Leave a commentThis week’s newest releases feature an engineer on a quest to complete an impossible radio transmitter, a time-stranded master scout, and a tribe’s race against to clock to pay a debt–or lose their lands. The Earth a Machine to Speak (Yankee Republic #5) – Fenton Wood A young radio engineer travels across an alt-history America, […]
Sensor Sweep: Kull, Star Trek, Dying Earth, Doc Vandal
Monday , 13, July 2020 Sensor Sweep 7 CommentsPublishing (Pulp Archivist): The market is contracting, without signs of stopping, from at least the mid-2000s generational handover. Digital and its different margins have likely kept some of these magazines in business far longer than print runs can justify. It’s almost to the point where the established science fiction “fandom” does not and should not […]
We are in the middle of a small press fiction golden age – Weirdbook, Tales from the Magician’s Skull, Storyhack, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly come to mind. It reminds me of the old D.I.Y. attitude in punk and alternative music in the late 1970s though the 80s. It is hard to believe that I reviewed the […]
2004’s Pulp Fictioneers, a collection of Writer’s Digest columns reprinted by John Locke, contains a wonderful little essay on the state of science fiction by Amazing Stories editor Jerry K. Westerfield. Entitled “The Sky’s No Limit”, Westerfield’s January 1940 column gives rare circulation figures, a who’s who of pre-Campbelline science fiction (Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Taine, Abraham Merrit, […]