Blog Archives
sDMR Books has a series of reprint anthologies of classic fantastic fiction. The first is Planetary Adventures. “Heroic tales of sword-swinging adventure can sometimes be found in unlikely places—such as the pages of Golden Age science fiction magazines! Rather than being set in the dim past or a fantastic dream-world, the stories in this collection […]
Tryst in Time: Cosmic Romance
Sunday , 29, September 2019 Authors, Before the Big Three, Fiction, Short Fiction 1 CommentThe concept of imaging past lives, reincarnation, wandering egos has been an idea going back over a century in fiction. H. Rider Haggard had the idea of past loves in She (1886). He returned with variations of the idea in The […]
An Important Predecessor to Pulp, Fantasy, and Science Fiction: The Ruritanian Romance
Saturday , 3, February 2018 Before the Big Three, Book Review, Fiction 12 CommentsI first came across the Ruritanian romance, a genre featuring adventure in a small, fictional, usually European kingdom, in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. While that version was decidedly un-heroic, as Nabokov’s tragicomic works tend to be, it still impressed me as a promising setting for a story. Later, in Philip Jose Farmer’s Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of […]
Between Sherlock Holmes and Marlowe: Nero Wolfe
Saturday , 25, November 2017 Authors, Before the Big Three, Fiction 13 CommentsIt’s easy to forget nowadays, given the legion of predictable, played-out, repetitive, and boring works, but the mystery genre is relatively young. The earliest notable entries were several Poe short stories featuring C. Auguste Dupin (1841-1844), Collins’ The Moonstone (1868), and Dickens’ unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). The Dupin stories were the earliest and most influential, […]
Mary Shelley gets a lot of credit these days. It’s been increasingly said that her seminal work Frankenstein birthed the science fiction genre. I personally find the arguments unconvincing, as do some of my esteemed colleagues. Make no mistake – Frankenstein was a great tale, and I certainly enjoyed my read-through of it last year. But […]
A Science Fiction Pulp Classic: The Lost World
Saturday , 30, September 2017 Before the Big Three, Book Review, Fiction 12 CommentsWhile far from unknown, and especially popular in the first few decades after its release, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World is rarely mentioned as a pulp adventure. And yet, released in 1912, the same year as Tarzan of the Apes and a year before The Insidious Dr.Fu-Manchu, it’s part of the same tradition. Primarily known for Sherlock […]
Keeping Christianity in Christian Fantasy
Saturday , 16, September 2017 Before the Big Three 14 CommentsThe other day I was leafing through my Treasury of Fantasy (I love me some shortish SFF) and pondering what to read next. Phantastes, perhaps, or the King of Elfland’s Daughter? I was hungering for something a bit leaner, and given that it had been quite some time since I had partaken of anything Arthurian, I decided […]
Heroines, Then and Now
Saturday , 9, September 2017 Appendix N, Authors, Before the Big Three, Fiction 20 CommentsA frequent criticism of older stories, pulp or otherwise, is that they feature a “damsel in distress”. That the woman in question is nothing more than a prize to be won. This is considered bad, and earnest leftist writers of today seek to correct this horrible injustice by creating “strong female protagonists”. Right away, one […]
The Pulpish Master: Rafael Sabatini
Saturday , 26, August 2017 Authors, Before the Big Three 9 CommentsWhen I mention bold fighting heroes laughing at death and their enemies, odious and powerful villains, non-stop action and adventure in picturesque settings, and brave, beautiful, worthy women, what writer comes to mind? For most readers of this blog, it would be Robert E. Howard. But another name fits equally well, that of the great […]
So far we’ve looked at examples of strong women characters in SFF from both hundreds of years ago (Bradamante) and 20 years ago (Kathryn Janeway). We also talked about Leigh Brackett, the Queen of Space Opera, who made some major waves during the 40’s and 50’s. So why do I keep coming back to this? […]
There are two myths about scifi/fantasy that refuse to die and must need be repeatedly bludgeoned back down – that women have historically been excluded from the industry and that there is a serious lack of strong women characters in the genre. In my last post I talked about the Queen of Space Opera, Leigh Brackett, […]