Blog Archives

Action on Azura by Robertson Osborne was featured in the Fall 1949 issue of Planet Stories.

Pretty Good Punch For Its Weight: Third Flatiron Anthologies’ Hyperpowers Hyperpowers is an anthology of sixteen short stories of science fiction available in several formats from the publisher’s web site. I reviewed the ebook format, which contained no errors worth mentioning and played out across my screen with ease and had smooth links throughout where […]

Captain Midas by Alfred Coppel, Jr. appeared in the Fall 1949 issue of Planet Stories. Captain Midas is another ‘tough’ story of the hard, grizzled men of space, but without some of the silliness of Ordeal in Space.  Let me start off by saying this would’ve made a great episode of The Outer Limits. The […]

Ordeal in Space by Ralph Sloan appeared in the Fall 1949 issue of Planet Stories.  It is unrelated to the Robert Heinlein story by the same name. Ordeal in Space is a gritty story of a cop who’s walking a dangerous line between the law and his desire for revenge.  It’s a pretty ‘tough’ tale […]

The Enchantress of Venus by Leigh Brackett appeared as the featured cover story in the Fall 1949 issue of Planet Stories.  This novella is the second (chronologically the 3rd) book in the original Eric John Stark Trilogy.  While Stark is pretty badass, I’d only peg him as 4th level.  Also of note, this may be the […]

Coming of the Gods by Chester Whitehorn was featured in the Summer 1945 issue of Planet Stories. One of the many reasons why I’m doing Short Reviews is to share what stories from the pulps were like and what they were about, as many of these have never been collected or reprinted; I feel that […]

Cosmic Yo-Yo by Ross Rocklynne appeared in the Summer 1945 issue of Planet Stories. The Cosmic Yo-yo is a fairly short Blue-collar space romance by Ross Rocklynne.  This one was panned a bit in the letters to the editor in the following issue, partly because of its rather silly premise, but I actually really liked […]

Maybe it’s just my evangelical Christian upbringing, but what Protestants call the “Intertestamental Period” has always been kind of fascinating to me. As a young’un, all I knew was that the Bible stopped for a while and then started up again; as a seminarian, I’ve got a way better grasp of what went on then, […]

Assault on a City by Jack Vance appeared in the 1974 collection Universe: 4. I’m doing something a bit different this week; circumstances have kept me from having time to hit the pulp stack but having seen a few articles on the Sensor Sweep mentioning the rapey nature of some of Vance’s characters and the questioning […]

While Anthony and I are dealing with the end of our semesters, Ben Zwycky, a fellow superversive author, will be holding down the fort. I’ll be back in a few weeks with something relevant, because I don’t think this is the right blog for a discussion about the filioque controversy. Without further ado, Part 3 […]

Mists of Mars by George A. Whittington appeared in the Summer 1945 issue of Planet Stories. Whittington does a good deal better, I feel, with this Planetary Romance than with his space thriller A Battlefield in Black; with fewer characters, he’s able to bring more life to them without too much taken up by the […]