Blog Archives
sThe word arrived this past week that author John Maddox Roberts had died on May 23, 2024 at age 76. There was a period when I read a steady number of Roberts’ novels. He might be best remembered today for having written eight Conan pastiche novels for Tor from 1985-1995. The first thing I ever […]
The word went out this week that author Brian Lumley died on January 2, 2024. He had retired from writing. ISFDB has his fiction ending in 2012 with the exception of “A Dreamer’s Tale” in Trevor Kennedy’s Phantasmagoria Special Edition Series, May 2022. He made it to 86, which is a respectable age to reach. […]
David Drake died this past Sunday on December 10th at age 78. I had read that he had Parkinson’s disease a couple years ago. He mentioned in his November newsletter of having mini-strokes. He has been a part of my reading life the past 40 years. I first heard of him looking at the Tor/Pinnacle […]
Matthew Pungitore Interviews Alex of Cirsova Magazine Hello! I am Matthew Pungitore! In this article, I’ll be talking with Alex of Cirsova magazine! Without further ado, let’s go! MATTHEW: Hello! Thank you very much for talking with me today, Alex! Can you tell us a little about yourself? who you are? what you do? what […]
Best of collections are good introductions to a writer. In the case of The Best of Jerry Pournelle, it is a case of collecting various odds and ends, many I had not read before. This is a sort of memorial collection as it came out after his death in 2017. This is a big anthology […]
I received a message Tuesday night that Richard L. Tierney had died. It was the proverbial punch to the gut as I had talked to Dick a few weeks earlier and he seemed to be doing fine for a man in his mid-80s. The first work of fiction by Richard Tierney I ever read was […]
Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) had one of the highest public profiles for a science fiction writer. He used to be on The Tonight Show now and then and had his own T.V. show (Ray Bradbury Theater). When the space shuttle blew up in 1986, I saw him on Nightline. I read The Martian Chronicles in 11th […]
This is the fourth installment in a series wherein I examine a batch of stories from The Philip K. Dick Reader. So far, the stories show the Cold War with the potential for WWIII weighed heavily on Philip K. Dick’s mind. Robots were also a favorite topic. “Upon the Dull Earth” (Beyond Fantasy Fiction #9, […]
This is the third batch of stories examined from The Philip K. Dick Reader. “To Serve the Master” (Imagination, February 1956): Applequist is outside and finds a half-buried robot in a ravine. The robot is dead but not damaged. They were all thought destroyed years ago. Applequist lives in one of the underground cities run […]
Last week, I began to examine The Philip K. Dick Reader. I had quoted Algis Budrys who observed Dick’s short fiction in the 1950s was all over the place. Here are the next five stories: “The Last of the Masters” (Orbit No. 5, November-December 1954). Post-apocalypse is a recurring item in Dick’s fiction. This starts […]
If you go to the Internet Movie Database and type in Philip K. Dick, there are 38 credits listed. I can’t think of any other American science fiction writer from the classic era of magazine and mass-market paperbacks with this many media adaptations. Philip K. Dick was a prolific writer of science fiction stories during […]
I enjoy non-fiction about fiction. A good essay about an author will get me to check them out. One that made me want to read the author was Jack Vance. It is a collection of essays from Taplinger’s Writers of the 21st Century. There were seven books in the series from 1977 to 1983: Arthur […]