Conan (Essential Malady): Whatever the truth is, Conan the Adventurer was certainly one of my earliest introductions to Robert E. Howard’s most popular character. The show originally broadcast in late 1992 and had a longer second and final season in late 1993 but I don’t believe I watched it until a year or two after the original run.

Cinema (With Both Hands): Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two movie adaption of the second half of Frank Herbert’s Dune is very good. Verging on greatness. Villeneuve successfully captured key thematic elements of Dune in a way that is likely to resonate with audiences now.

Conan (Sprague de Camp Fan): Conan the Swordsman was the first book in the Bantam Conan series. It was originally published in August 1978 and has been reprinted several times by Bantam, Ace, and Tor Books. It featured an introduction, 7 short stories, and a scholarly article. The first story was “Legions of the Dead” by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp.

Star Wars (Fandom Pulse): The rollercoaster ride of Patty Jenkins’ involvement with the “Star Wars” universe continues as she hints at a potential revival of the long-stalled project Rogue Squadron. This announcement comes after a whirlwind of speculation and uncertainty surrounding the film’s fate, leaving fans wondering about the direction of the beloved franchise under Kathleen Kennedy’s leadership.

Review (DVS Press): It looks like a serious book, but is it? Looking at the sample, I’d say it is indicative of a developing writer. It is Shadiversity’s only book and his first book, and it reads like a first book. My writing was probably similar back in 2001 (I can’t find my old manuscripts at the moment to confirm), but I didn’t formally publish anything until 2016. I consider even the books I wrote in 2013, when I shifted my focus from music to writing, to be unpublishable.

Forthcoming (DMR Books): In 2020, I published Necromancy in Nilztiria, my first collection of sword-and-sorcery and dark fantasy stories set in a world of my own creation. This April nine new tales of this fabled land will appear in Dark Dreams of Nilztiria, detailing the exploits of infamous heroes such as the cursed warrior Vran the Chaos-Warped, the freewheeling barbarian Avok Kur Storn, and the enigmatic wizard Xaarxool the Necromancer.

Popular Culture (Wasteland & Sky): Much like in the CD world, there are specific eras and companies which cheaped out on manufacturing which led to whole runs of discs simply not being able to withstand the passage of time. So if you’ve been collecting since the format started, or maybe you got your start with old used discs, it would be very smart to check them and see if they are holding up.

Science Fiction (Por Por Books): The Face of the Waters’ first was published in hardcover in 1991. This Bantam Spectra paperback edition (436 pp.) was published in November 1992 and features cover design by A.I.R. Studio, Inc. The planet Hydros is a ‘water world’ completely covered in seawater. The indigenous ‘Gillies’, a race of humanoid salamanders, have erected artificial islands constructed of sea plants.

Horror (M Porcius): Bouncing around isfdb, I came upon evidence of the existence of an anthology ostensibly edited by Alden H. Norton but (we are told) in fact edited by SF historian Sam Moskowitz: Masters of Horror, published in 1968.

Comic Books (DMR Books): For a lot of people their first encounter with Sword and Sorcery was Marvel’s Conan comics. This was not mine. I first encountered S&S reading Fritz Leiber’s novella Ill Met Lankhmar. (Though I may have seen the ‘80s Conan the Barbarian movie on TV before then.)

Fiction (Paperback Warrior): According to his obituary in The Washington Post, author Franklin M. Davis Jr. (1918-1981) served with U.S. armored forces in Europe during WWII. What better author than Davis to write harrowing adventure paperbacks like Spearhead (1957), A Medal for Frankie (1959) and Kiss the Tiger (1961).

Science Fiction (Pulp Fiction Reviews): Science fiction writer Dale Cozort has a flair for writing alternate time-line adventures and cross-dimensional platforms. In this novel, he offers up a world where very rich men discovered strange gates that lead to an alternate Earth still existing in prehistoric times. They call it the Wild and it is populated by sabertooth tigers, giant bears, things called dire wolves and of course massive furry mastodons.

History (Isegoria): On March 3, 1795, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon set sail from Marseilles with 15 ships, 1,174 guns and 16,900 men to recapture Corsica from Paoli and the British: His expedition was soon scattered by a British squadron of fifteen ships with fewer guns and half the number of men.

RPG (The Other Side): I have a slight sidestep today. I have been playing around with something for a bit. You all know I am a fan of Mark Taormino’s Maximum Mayhem adventures from Dark Wizard Games. I have been getting his latest in both the 1st Ed and 5th Ed versions, one for me and one for my kids. I have also mentioned that while they are designed overtly for “First Edition Rules” or what I call “The Advanced Era” the adventures top off at the 14th level, making them compatible “in spirit” with my beloved B/X rules.

Greyhawk (Domain of Greyhawk): Thomas Kelly released his fan Greyhawk novel back in January, and I just sat down (in COVID enforced isolation) and read it (in epub format).

I really enjoyed it. It was a little rough in a few segues and probably needed a professional edit but I’ve paid for published books worse than this. As a Greyhawk fan I can commend it for being worth the time to read!

Fantasy (Shiver in the Archives): In 1917, the John W. Luce Company of Boston published a “Gift Edition,” a boxed edition of six volumes of his early stories. One set he inscribed (probably during his 1919 US tour), and it was put up for auction by Swann Galleries in 2011. Their catalog entry here shows the handwritten poem by Dunsany that he inscribed in The Gods of Pegana. I transcribe it here.

Fantasy (Tolkien and Fantasy): The recent hullabaloo over posthumously revising classic texts to conform to contemporary ideologies reminded me that I have long wanted to look into the changes Roald Dahl himself made in 1973 to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Here are the results of my study. [A companion piece on the first edition points of the Knopf edition can be found here.]

Science Fiction (Dark Worlds Quarterly): John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (aka “Revolt of the Triffids”) was a watershed moment in Science Fiction as well as in the career of Wyndham himself. Before 1951, John Beynon Harris had had a career as a Gernsbackian SF Pulp writer, followed by a second career as a detective story and British SF writer. As one of the White Hart crew that Arthur C. Clarke wrote about in that collection, he hung out with other Brits like Samuel Youd (John Christopher) and Art Clarke.

Comic Books (Silver Key): I haven’t bought a new comic book in 33 years, when I purchased the April 1991 Savage Sword of Conan as a high school senior. The venerable magazine ended its long run four years later. I was in college in these waning days of SSOC and so had no spending money for comics; what little funds I had went toward beer.

Fantasy (Rip Jagger’s Dojo): The Road to OZ by L. Frank Baum was published in 1909 and is the darkest of the OZ books to date. With great artwork b John R. Neil this is the fourth trip Dorothy makes to the fairy land of OZ and for her at least it’s getting to be rather normal. She’s so accustomed to odd happenings that she doesn’t think twice about travelling alongside a stranger known only to her and us as “The Shaggy Man”.

Science Fiction (Black Gate): If you want to understand science fiction, it’s not a bad idea to start by reading Year’s Best volumes. And if you’re going to do that, it’s not a bad idea to start with the World’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, an annual series that began in 1965 and lasted for an amazing 26 volumes. The last of which, The 1990 Annual World’s Best SF, appeared four months before Wollheim’s death at the age of 76.