Blog Archives
sSensor Sweep: Richard Shaver, Pan Fantasy, Cirsova, Hall of Judgement
Monday , 2, April 2018 Sensor Sweep 3 CommentsCinema (Reactionary Times): “Rian Johnson has left J.J. Abrams not just a mess but a complete mess. When The Empire Strikes Back ended, there was an excellent setup for the next movie. Why it practic…al…ly…uh… No, actually. Now that I think about it, the end of Empire created a major plot restriction for the film […]
Sensor Sweep: A. Merritt, Leigh Brackett, Dungeons of Chaos, and Rocket’s Red Glare
Monday , 26, March 2018 Sensor Sweep 5 CommentsFiction (Got Your Games): “A little light reading I have, over the years, read a few of the books written about games and gamers and I’ll list here as many as I can recall off the top of my head, giving a brief review and recommendation. The Elfish Gene by Mark Barrowcliffe Just awesome – […]
Sensor Sweep: Weird Book, Freedom Squadron, Shaver Mystery, and Wasteland Warfare
Monday , 19, March 2018 Sensor Sweep 3 CommentsFiction (Scifi Movie Page): “Paul Ganley’s Weirdbook was one of the best small press publications of the 1970s. Modeled very much on Weird Tales, it featured “weird” fiction of all kinds. “Weird fiction” was a catch-all term used by Lovecraft and others in the early 20th century to describe everything from fantasy to horror to […]
Sensor Sweep: A Wrinkle in Time, William Hope Hodgson, and The Shape of Water
Monday , 12, March 2018 Sensor Sweep 6 CommentsD&D (Jeffro Johnson): “This is one of the coolest things on the internet right now: Ron Edwards delves into the topic of how D&D was actually experienced by most people most of the time from the seventies on through to today’s mainline derivatives. And note: this is not about what went on in at Dave […]
Sensor Sweep: Sax Rohmer, Fighting Men, Tolkien, Arthur Machen, and Threads of Fate
Monday , 5, March 2018 Sensor Sweep 2 CommentsPulps (Pulp Archivist): “In an attempt to show the wider context of the changes in 1940s literature and how they may have affected Campbell and science fiction, let’s take a look at Doc Savage, the Shadow, and Babette Rosmond. The pulps were dying by inches during the Forties and the reading audience, cynical after another […]
Sensor Sweep: Dilvish the Damned, Solomon Kane, Black Panther, Black Mask Magazine
Monday , 26, February 2018 Sensor Sweep 5 CommentsWriting (The Pulp Archivist): “In a writing job, dialogue stands out the most; it is also the potent element and certainly the most versatile. Excellent dialogue appears rarely, but it then invariably commands its just reward; and for that reason it certainly deserves your careful study and attention. A cardinal rule in practically all writing […]
Sensor Sweep: Captain Blood, Cosmic Questions, Frostgrave, and Han Solo
Monday , 19, February 2018 Sensor Sweep 2 CommentsCinema (Men of the West): “I won’t be going to see the new Star Wars movie about a young Han Solo. I’ve ended my abusive relationship with Disney Star Wars, and I’m never going back. It was hard. I loved her so much, and I’m still shocked at the level of betrayal. You see, I […]
Sensor Sweep: Emil Petaja, Battle of Hastings, Polish Legions, and Pirates
Monday , 5, February 2018 Sensor Sweep Leave a commentFiction (DMR Books): “ ‘Swords of the Red Brotherhood’ appears to take place before “Black Vulmea’s Vengeance.” It’s essentially the same story as the Conan yarn “The Black Stranger”, recycled with a different protagonist. In both stories, a tainted noble with a relentless enemy has fled to a distant, savage coast and hidden there, until […]
Sensor Sweep: Materialism, Le Guin, New Sun, and Rokugan
Monday , 29, January 2018 Sensor Sweep 1 CommentFiction (Tellers of Weird Tales): “Lovecraft aside, weird fiction is a warning against materialism, for it is a genre that lives in a pre-science, pre-Enlightenment age, one in which magic and supernatural monsters are still possible. Its materialist characters are science-minded, working in physics, chemistry, medicine, and so on. The materialist himself is arrogant, superior, sure of himself […]
Sensor Sweep: A. Merritt, Dungeons & Dragons, Monster Manuals, and the Murder of Sword and Sorcery
Monday , 22, January 2018 Sensor Sweep 10 CommentsWriters (On an Underwood No. 5): :Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian wandered into the pages of Weird Tales with “The Phoenix on the Sword” (Dec 1932), and was followed by “The Scarlet Citadel” (Jan 1933), “The Tower of the Elephant” (Mar), “Black Colossus” (Jun), “The Slithering Shadow” (Sep), “The Pool of the Black One” (Oct), “Rogues […]
Sensor Sweep: Maal Dweb, Beastmaster, Federation & Empire, and John Carter RPG
Monday , 15, January 2018 Sensor Sweep 4 CommentsWriters (DMR Books): “This date marks the one hundred twenty-fifth anniversary of the birth of Clark Ashton Smith. Readers of this site should require no introduction, as Smith was one of the “big three” writers for Weird Tales, along with Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. It only seems appropriate that we should honor this […]