Blog Archives
sMy Favorite Conan Story: Shadows in Zamboula
Saturday , 20, May 2017 Appendix N, Authors, Book Review, Fiction, Short Fiction 9 CommentsI don’t profess to be an expert on the excellent Robert E Howard. In fact, it was over two decades after Conan the Barbarian became a favorite character of mine that I read Howard’s stories about the Cimmerian! My first exposure to the pulp titan was in the form of Saturday morning cartoon Conan the […]
The Double-Edged Sword of Dogmatism
Saturday , 13, May 2017 Appendix N, Authors, Before the Big Three, Fiction, Uncategorized 12 CommentsLast week, I wrote an observation about Lovecraft’s works. In the comments, several readers mentioned The Shadow over Innsmouth, a tale I had embarrassingly not read at the time. I rectified this error soon after. And wow, what an amazing story! An imaginative gem from beginning to end, with steadily mounting tension, an inspired explanation to the […]
The Forsaken Sequel: The Unforsaken Hiero
Monday , 1, May 2017 Appendix N, Authors, Book Review, Fiction, Uncategorized 8 CommentsAppendix N entry Hiero’s Journey by Sterling Lanier is one of my favorite books. A thrilling masterpiece of fast-paced creativity and high adventure from start to finish. Its protagonist is Hiero Desteen, a powerful telepathic Christian warrior riding a “morse”, a mutation of a moose and a horse, in a post-nuclear wasteland filled with oddities, horrors, and […]
Certain writers evoke a time and place in an especially vivid manner. To the point that a reader gains a genuine sense of familiarity with a setting completely alien to his own experience. Its sights, sounds, and way of life. One might imagine this is the province of serious dramas, but I have come across it […]
The Pulp One-Hit Wonder: Sax Rohmer
Saturday , 22, April 2017 Authors, Before the Big Three, Book Review, Fiction 14 CommentsAt first glance, it seems strange that Arthur Henry Ward, writing under the pseudonym Sax Rohmer, doesn’t garner more attention on this blog. After all, he wrote the enormously entertaining, successful, and influential The Insidious Dr.Fu-Manchu. But upon further reflection, it makes sense. The book in question is not fantasy or science fiction. And as we […]
The RPG Tequendria by Scott Malthouse and published through The Trollish Delver Games was released recently on DriveThruRPG as a pay-what-you-want pdf and let me tell you, I immediately wanted to snap it up. Why? Well, the price was right but, that’s not the main reason. The main reason is that it is the only […]
The Strange Career of Robert Sheckley
Saturday , 15, April 2017 Authors, Fiction, Short Fiction 8 CommentsScience fiction writer Robert Sheckley was born in New York City in 1928 and died there in 2005. He lived most of the intervening years in the United States. And yet, he was never more than a moderate success in his native land. His short stories attained some popularity, with a few being adapted into […]
John Carter of Pellucidar
Saturday , 15, April 2017 Appendix N, Authors, Book Review, Fiction 18 CommentsNot too long ago, HP of Throwback Thursday fame and I decided to both read the same book and write up our reactions. This wouldn’t be the first time for us, though this time we agreed on a book mutually and well ahead of time. Because he is a gentleman, he also offered to let […]
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. […]
Conan meets Cthulhu
Saturday , 18, March 2017 Appendix N, Authors, Before the Big Three, Short Fiction 23 CommentsIn Jeffro’s last Sensor Sweep he made note of the Alexandru Costantin’s recent blog post, which puts forth a rather bold claim – that Robert E. Howard did Lovecraftian horror better than H.P. himself. For those who may be unaware, Howard was one of the major contributors to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. In other words, he wrote stories […]
The first number produced by the extrapolated algorithm was off by one-ten billionth. There were nine zeros behind the decimal point. It was a tiny error, all but impossible to detect unless one was looking specifically for it. The second number was off by twice that. Two in ten billion. Or, rather, one in five […]