Blog Archives
sYou have all probably seen the movie, The Dirty Dozen. Seems like it ran every month on one of the cable channels back in the 90s. It was a movie like The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape that would feature an ensemble cast of male actors doing manly things. I picked up a beat […]
DMR Books has had an ambitious publishing schedule. This summer has seen the release of Planetary Adventures, Prehistoric Adventures, and Viking Adventures. I picked up Prehistoric Adventures last weekend at the DMR Books table at Pulpfest. I have a fondness for prehistoric/caveman fiction. Who among you read Jim Kjelgaard’s The Fire Hunter as a lad? […]
The fifth issue of Science Fiction Adventures from August 1957 continued the “3 complete novels” format. Robert Engle produced the cover painting for this issue. Robert Silverberg was present as “Ivar Jorgeson” in “This World Must Die!” The Jorgenson biography states he was born in the little fishing village of Haugesund, Norway immigrating to the […]
The fourth issue (June 1957) of Science Fiction Adventures had another cover by Emsh illustrating Harlan Ellison’s “Run for the Stars.” Algis Budrys makes his first appearance in Science Fiction Adventures with “Yesterday’s Man.” I enjoyed Budrys’ The Falling Torch, a novel of guerrilla warfare against occupying aliens. “Yesterday’s Man” is a post-apocalyptic story of […]
Science Fiction Adventures was a title used for magazines twice, three times depending on how you count the U.K version. The second title from 1956 to 1958 was a converted detective magazine, Suspect Detective Stories. Suspect lasted for five issues from November 1955 to October 1956. It was edited by Larry T. Shaw and did […]
Great Science Fiction Adventures (Lancer Books, 1963) is one of my favorite reprint anthologies. The book consists of four novellas reprinted from the magazine Science Fiction Adventures. Larry T. Shaw edited both the magazine and this anthology. Science Fiction Adventures was a digest magazine from Royal Publications published from December 1956 to June 1958 for […]
Almost six years ago, I wrote about Tanith Lee when she died, as a sword & sorcery writer. She was not at the blood and thunder end of the spectrum but at the other more fantastic end. Her stories were dark fairy tales. They were fables presented as modern fantasy. Tanith Lee could be more […]
Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) had one of the highest public profiles for a science fiction writer. He used to be on The Tonight Show now and then and had his own T.V. show (Ray Bradbury Theater). When the space shuttle blew up in 1986, I saw him on Nightline. I read The Martian Chronicles in 11th […]
The movie Blade Runner (1982) was the first cinema adaptation of Philip K. Dick based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Last month, I picked up the novel out of town at a Half Price Books. The store had a few copies of a U.K. Orion Books trade paperback edition. Do Androids […]
We now come to the last four stories in The Philip K. Dick Reader. These are also stories all made into movies. “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (F&SF April 1966): The story that became the movie Total Recall. Douglas Quail is an office worker with an obsession of going to Mars. The wife […]
This is the fourth installment in a series wherein I examine a batch of stories from The Philip K. Dick Reader. So far, the stories show the Cold War with the potential for WWIII weighed heavily on Philip K. Dick’s mind. Robots were also a favorite topic. “Upon the Dull Earth” (Beyond Fantasy Fiction #9, […]
I have been slowly making my way through the issues of Tales of the Magician’s Skull. Most recently, issue number four. 8.5 x 11 inches in dimensions, 72 pages, $14.99, published in 2020. Cover by Doug Kovacs for this issue. John C. Hocking’s Benhus returns in “Guardian of the Broken Gem.” Benhus is on a […]