Blog Archives
sWolf-Dreams by Michael D. Weaver is the first in a fantasy trilogy. Published by Avon Books in May 1987, mass market paperback format, 186 pages. Michael D. Weaver (1961-1998) had seven novels published between 1987-1996. I read Bloodfang (1989), the last in the trilogy sometime back. I don’t remember when I read the novel. I […]
Peter Haining was one of the top-tier anthologists of the late 20th Century. He would cover a theme including contents that were deep and wide. If you bought a book he edited, you would come out knowing much more than when you started. One of my favorites is Great Irish Tales of Fantasy and Myth. […]
Last year, a friend of mine mentioned he planned on rereading Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream without irony. Synchronicity as I had been thinking of doing the same thing. Norman Spinrad wrote one of the greatest Star Trek episodes, “The Doomsday Machine” from Season 2. He wrote a couple competent space operas in the 60s, […]
I enjoy reading a western novel now and then. I had read a couple of Elmore Leonard’s westerns decades ago. More recently, I really enjoyed The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard. The T.V. show Justified was one of the few I would take time out to watch when it was one. I decided to […]
In the Blood is the fifth book in Jack Carr’s “Terminal List” series. The novel starts with a female Mossad agent who has killed someone in the nation of Burkina Faso in Africa. Leaving in a jet, it is blown out of the sky. She was a friend of James Reese going back to a […]
The Devil’s Hand is book #4 in Jack Carr’s “Terminal List” series. James Reese has been summoned by the new President of the United States to Camp David for a meeting. The President has a request. Twenty years earlier, his fiance was killed in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. There are […]
Savage Son is the third book in the Terminal List/James Reese series from Jack Carr. Reese is in Montana recuperating after brain surgery to remove a tumor caused by a drug given illegally for PTSD. He has vengeance on his mind. First, there is a CIA traitor who went over to the Russians and working […]
The Scandinavian sagas have had an influence on some the early fantasy writers: William Morris, E. R. Eddison, and of course J. R. R. Tolkien. I have had a copy of E. R. Eddison’s Styrbiorn the Strong lying around unread longer than I would like to admit. I have to get in the right frame […]
I mentioned George Shipway (1908-1982) a few weeks back as an accurate historical novelist. He had ten novels from 1968 to 1979. Three novels about Norman England, two novels about King Agamemnon, two Indian Raj novels, two political satire books, and Imperial Governor. Shipway served in the Anglo-Indian Army in the cavalry until 1946. Wallace […]
A novel I pulled out to reread is Don Tracy’s The Black Amulet. I read this decades ago and remembered liking it at the time. The novel is set in a barbaric period and I thought of another “Paperback Barbarian” entry. Don(ald Fiske) Tracy (1905-1976) was an American fiction writer who wrote for slick magazines, […]
Sword & sorcery as a fictional genre had its origin in the weird fiction pulp magazines of the late 1920s into the 1930s. There was a forgotten variation in Planet Stories in the 1940s. Then it disappeared from the magazines for the most part in the 1950s. There was a renascence in the digest magazines […]
The 1950s was a period when historical novels were very popular. Thomas B. Costain, Frank Yerby, Frank Slaughter were among the top tier. Some science fiction writers supplemented their income writing historicals including L. Sprague de Camp and Poul Anderson. Another was Gardner F. Fox. Fox’s specialty was the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. The […]