Blog Archives
sThe weird western has been the red headed step-child of genre fiction. The idea pops up now and then but has never really taken off in popular culture in any big way. More than likely, the first weird westerns I read were by Robert E. Howard in the Zebra paperback, Pigeons From Hell. The first […]
Choose Your Enemies and The Rising of the Shield Hero
Thursday , 6, September 2018 Book Review Leave a commentCommissar Ciaphas Cain, Hero of the Imperium, returns in Choose Your Enemies, his eleventh adventure for Warhammer 40,000’s Black Library imprint. While on a posting to a remote mining planet, Ciaphas Cain and the 597th Valhallan Regiment unearth a hedonistic Chaos cult. But rooting out the corruption soon takes them to the heavily populated industrial […]
I first heard of “men’s adventure magazines” or “men’s sweat magazine” in an article by Will Murray for Cryptic Publications’ Shudder Stories No. 1 back in the mid-1980s. Cryptic later did an one off imitation, Man’s Guts in 1989 (with a story by my friend Charles Hoffman). I was familiar with the spicy pulps, the weird […]
The Things’s Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales
Sunday , 26, August 2018 Book Review Leave a commentI have been picking up books from John Locke’s Off Trail Publications for a while it seems. I first met John at Pulp-Con in 1993 and always impressed by his erudition. His most recent book is The Thing’s Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales. “The struggle to establish the first fantastic-fiction magazine and the […]
The 1970s were the heyday for original sword and sorcery anthologies with original fiction. Lin Carter’s Flashing Swords series was the first. Andrew Offutt’s five volume Swords Against Darkness did a great job of bringing some small press writers to a wider audience. Heroic Fantasy edited by Gerald W. Page and Hank Reinhardt was the […]
On an Earth far enough in the future to be depopulated and recolonized by the survivors from other worlds, nine castles are the sum total of civilization. Through technological marvels and a hierarchy of subordinate slave species, humanity rules its home world as feudal lords. Occasionally, the younger men would break from the unceasing pageantry […]
Gordon R. Dickson (1923-2001) was a mainstay of mass market science fiction paperbacks in the 1970s and 80s. The “Dorsai” series was one of the first in the military science fiction series going back to 1959. Dickson and Poul Anderson could always be counted on supplying adventurous science fiction. Dickson was a pillar for Analog […]
Philip Jose Farmer (1918-2009) is one of those authors that I like a few books of his. He liked to write about fictional characters that inspired him. He wrote more about Tarzan and his world than any other classic character. For years, Time’s Last Gift was on the read one day list. It was also […]
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, isekai and light novel fans. A salaryman burnout works themselves to death at their desk. As they enter the afterlife, a kind deity takes pity on them, and offers a chance to have a second life in an MMO-inspired world– This time, it’s different, I swear. This time the burnout’s […]
Library book sales can be a wonderful thing. Sometimes, they are a bust. Other times you find a copy of the Gnome Press Conan the Conqueror with dustjacket for $1.00. That happened to me in 1997. This year was better than usual. A new location with more room. Someone appears to have donated their collection […]
In the opening moments of Black Dawn, by Jay Allan, the remnants of the once-proud White Fleet are leading the far superior ships of the Hegemony on a wild goose chase through unexplored space. The longer they can prolong the pursuit, the more time Admiral Tyler Barron has to rally the Confederation’s defenses before the […]
If you are among pulp magazine enthusiasts, Standard Magazine’s titles generally do not rank high on the list of favorites. Late 1940s Startling Stories does have its fans. There are some who collect Texas Rangers, a long running series featuring Jim Hatfield, Texas Ranger. I have never met anyone who goes out of their way to collect […]