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sShort Reviews – Too Smart to Die, by George Antonio Wetter
Friday , 27, January 2017 Book Review Leave a commentToo Smart to Die by George Antonio Wetter appeared in the June 1943 issue of G-Men Detective Magazine. Too Smart to Die is a clever and fun little piece of wartime propaganda with a simple message: if you’re a Nazi 5th column agent, the G-Men will find you. Otto Karlweis (a fictionalized version of Fritz […]
Spend enough time with anime, manga, or JRPG video games, and you’ll encounter the seven secrets of the school, a set of mysteries used to awe transfer students. Upon further investigation, each of these secrets is usually revealed to be nothing more than an exaggerated rumor or a strange trick of sound and light. But […]
WRIGHT ON: Lost Works – The Real Buck Rogers
Sunday , 22, January 2017 Before the Big Three, Book Review 11 CommentsWRIGHT ON: Lost Works The Real Buck Rogers Inspired by the Appendix N columns of Jeffro Johnson, and by the gift by a generous fan of a complete collection of the Ballantine ‘Adult Fantasy’ line edited by Lin Carter, I would like to invite, in this and future columns, the readers here at the Castalia […]
THROWBACK SF THURSDAY: The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Thursday , 19, January 2017 Book Review 7 CommentsThe year is 1997. Otherwise known as the “far future” for people living in 1974. William Mandella is a bright, young physics student. Or he was, before he got drafted into the United Nations Exploratory Force (emphasis on force) under the Elite Conscription Act of 1996 (because wars aren’t really an outrage until the elite […]
Short Reviews – Thieves’ Blueprint, by Ronal Kayser (as Dale Clark)
Friday , 13, January 2017 Book Review 2 CommentsThieves’ Blueprint by Ronal Kayser writing as Dale Clark appeared as the featured novelette in the March 1943 issue of G-Men Detective. Thieves’ Blueprint has almost everything you’d expect from a “hard boiled detective story”: a mystery that starts and ends with a dame, a couple of no goods up to no good, a murder, […]
On Yanthus Prime, a femme fatale must turn cat burglar, teaming with an intelligent insect swarm to stay one step ahead of the Mob’s clutches. On Earth, a fighter pilot is kidnapped by an alien spaceship and forced to become an interstellar janissary. In a galaxy far away, a bulletproof thug tries to keep his space […]
REVIEW: Starship Liberator by B. V. Larson and David VanDyke
Tuesday , 10, January 2017 Book Review 2 CommentsMy whole life I have yearned for epic space battles. And no, Starship Troopers and Ender’s Game are not enough to slake my thirst. Many years back when I got hold of the Honor Harrington series, I was done for. I couldn’t stop reading them! After a while I burned out. Honor was great, sure. […]
I had mentioned two years back about the idea of an anthology of orphan sword and sorcery characters– Jirel of Joiry, Elak of Atlantis, Rald of Forthe, Prester John, Kothar etc. We have seen some characters continued by other hands, Adrian Cole has written two Elak of Atlantis stories and now we have a full-fledged […]
Pa Howdy Goes Fishing by Laurence Donovan appeared in the June 1943 issue of G-Men Detective. Though much better known for his 18 Doc Savage novels, Lawrence Donovan apparently wrote several Pa Howdy stories for various detective publications through the 30s and 40s. Pa & Ma Howdy are Montana ranchers who’ve moved to west coast in […]
SUPERVERSIVE: “A Series of Unfortunate Events” Part 2: The Baptism of Lemony Snicket
Tuesday , 3, January 2017 Book Review, Superversive 6 CommentsIn part one of this series, “The Dark Brilliance of ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’”, I ended my article with this: I was going to end this article here, but I got to thinking: Would the world be a better place if these books didn’t exist? It’s an interesting question without, I think, a straightforward answer. Being old […]
When I had heard that Larry Correia had written a fantasy novel, I took notice. The only fiction of his that I had read was “The Great Sea Beast” in Kaiju Rising. His story really stuck out in comparison to the rest of the stories in that anthology. This past summer, I read “The Keeper […]
Short Reviews – Panama Peril, by Jean Francis Webb
Friday , 30, December 2016 Book Review Leave a commentPanama Peril by Jean Francis Webb appeared in the June 1943 issue of G-Men Detective. It was the 73rd Dan Fowler Novel (a regular feature of the magazine) and comprised about half of the issue. I’ve decided to branch out a bit in my pulp reading to see what else was going on in the 40s […]