Magazines (Pulp Super-Fan): I recently obtained Pulp Adventures #44 from Bold Venture Press, dated Winter 2024. A delay from the prior issue, but it looks like they are working to get back on schedule. We get science fiction, detective, crime, and horror, along with reviews and non-fiction this time.

Conan (Sprague de Camp Fan): Chapters 15 through 19 of Robert E. Howard’s only Conan novel, The Hour of the Dragon were published in the March 1936 issue of Weird Tales. Akivasha was introduced in Chapter 18. Conan is in Stygia, the city of Khemi, looking to confront Thutothmes and regain his Aquilonian throne.

Tolkien (Notion Club Papers): When the Lord of the Rings begins, we see almost everything from Frodo’s perspective, through Frodo’s eyes. But after as Frodo and Sam leave the Fellowship, and their separate journey with the One Ring proceeds, the point of view shifts from Frodo to Sam.

Conventions (Fandom Pulse): Gen Con has been known for its woke activism over the last decade, miring the convention in identity politics when it used to be known as the greatest table gaming convention in existence. Nothing has been worse in this regard than the Gen Con Writers’ Symposium.

Warhammer (Endymion): The west has not been doing well this year & Space Marine 2 is an anomaly, but why?

Writers (Adventures Fantastic): Today, September 12, is the birthday of Charles L. Grant (1942-2006). He passed away on September 15, just three days after sixty-fourth birthday. I never got the chance to meet him, but he is to my mind one of the central figures of the second half of the Twentieth Century.

Fantasy (Ken Lizzi): Today I’m going to cover the first quarter of the contents of A Treasury of Fantasy. This early 1980’s volume contains a chronologically arranged selection of fantasy, and bears the subtitle “Heroic Adventures in Imaginary Lands.” Interestingly, the stories chosen come from no farther back than the Volsunga Saga, circa 1270.

Pulp (Rough Edges): In 1931, after a very successful run in BLACK MASK with several series, Frederick Nebel began selling to DIME DETECTIVE, BLACK MASK’s main rival over at Popular Publications. Having chronicled the adventures of a private detective named Donahue for BLACK MASK, Nebel created a new one (or revived an old one from one of his Northerns, some say) in Jack Cardigan, an operative for the Cosmos Detective Agency.

Robert E. Howard (Michael K. Vaughan): Two New Books from The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press

Culture Wars (Fandom Pulse): Paul Weimer has been part of the establishment mob attacking anyone on the right in science fiction to gatekeep the publishing industry for a long time. In his social justice crusade, the former Barnes & Noble reviewer has made near-relentless attacks on Baen Books authors. Still, someone at Baen Books made the mistake of putting his name on the cover of what will be Howard Andrew Jones’s final sword & sorcery novel regardless.

Military Units (Frontier Partisans): It was an unprecedented moment in special operations history — surprise, speed and violence of action brought to bear in the full view of an international cadre of media. Strange-looking black clad men with bug-eye respirators hiding their faces, abseiling from the roof of an embassy building and blasting and crashing their way inside, armed with stubby machine guns (H&K MP5s)…

Games (Endy Mion TV): The west has not been doing well this year & Space Marine 2 is an anomaly, but why?

Hard-Boiled (Comics Radio): “Old Willie,” by William P. McGivern was published in the May 1953 issue of Manhunt, a wonderful magazine that regularly published superb hard-boiled fiction. “Old Willie” is indeed superb. I love the way it grabs you in the first paragraph:

Fantasy (Sargon of Akkad): Morally Grey Fantasy

James Bond (MI6-HQ): A new book celebrating the vehicles of the James Bond film franchise is coming soon from ‘Some Kind of Hero’ authors Matthew Field and Ajay Chowdhury.

Meticulously researched with many never-before-seen photographs, volume one of ‘Spy Octane’ is the first of three.

Edgar Rice Burroughs (Goodman Games): September 1 is the birthday of Edgar Rice Burroughs, affectionately called “ERB.” Although he’s best known for his Barsoom/Mars, Tarzan, Pellucidar, and Venus series, he wrote many other works, including historical novels and westerns. It’s beyond the scope of this article to reveal just how influential ERB has been to science fiction, fantasy, gaming, and all the sub-genres therein.

Authors (Silver Key): When I heard the news that Howard Andrew Jones was diagnosed with inoperable and fatal brain cancer, it staggered me. I’m still reeling.

Comic Books (MSN): However, licensed comic books have continued ever since, and one of Marvel’s most famous licensed characters was Conan the Barbarian, who became a hit comic book in the 1970s. However, reader Patrick Duke noted that it sure seemed like Marvel featured Conan on a lot of Marvel merchandise in the 1970s, right? He was on Marvel’s calendars, he was on the Marvel Slurpee cups at 7-11, and he was in the Marvel Topps stickers collection…

Mystery (Paperback Warrior): John Holbrook Vance (1916-2013) published most of his literary work under the name Jack Vance. As a respected science-fiction and fantasy author, Vance wrote many series titles like Dying Earth, Lyonesse, Demon Prince, and Durdane. While those two genres occupied most of Vance’s career, he still wrote mystery novels as Ellery Queen, Peter Held, and Alan Wade.

Science fiction (Goodman Games): Jack Holbrook Vance was summoned into this world just over a century ago in San Francisco on August 28, 1916. A writer of multiple genres, he is best known to fans of Dungeons and Dragons for his Dying Earth novels, one of the inspirations for the magic system, often called ‘Vancian’, in which magic-users memorize spells from their librams, and once cast, forget them for the day.

Star Trek (File 770): Fifty-eight years ago, on September 6, 1966, an ambitious science fiction television series called Star Trek premiered…in the Dominion of Canada. (It first aired in the United States two days later on the NBC television network and that date has wrongly been identified as Star Trek Day for decades. But, I digress…)

Weird Fiction (Tellers of Weird Tales): Weird Tales published four stories by the pseudonymous author John Flanders, all in 1934-1935. That was only the smallest part of his staggering output of about 9,000 stories and 5,000 articles, essays, reviews, and so on written from the 1920s until his death in 1964. John Flanders was born Raymundus Joannes de Kremer or Raymond Jean Marie De Kremer, in Ghent, Belgium, on July 8, 1887.

H. P. Lovecraft (Wormwoodiana): How authors’ estates are managed (or not) has long interested me. This book, L’Affaire Barlow, by Marcos Legaria, details the quarrels and back-stabbing among the friends of H.P. Lovecraft who sought to control Lovecraft’s literary estate.

Cold Steel (Fandabi Dozi): My Scottish Historical Knife Collection + Sgian Dubh Survival Knife Prototype

Cinema (Black Gate): At loose ends and not too keen on writing over the Labor Day holiday weekend, I decided to start a week-long Marvel deep dive. I had re-watched Guardians of the Galaxy stuff for the third one, so I set those aside. And I had watched the Logan movies not too long ago, so I skipped X-Men stuff.

History (MSN): A “very rare” Celtic helmet that could be up to around 2,400 years old has been unearthed at an archaeological site in Poland. The helmet was uncovered at the “Łysa Góra” site in Poland’s Mazovia region by a team from the State Archaeological Museum in Warsaw and the Department of Archaeology at the University of Warsaw.

H. P. Lovecraft (Tentaclii): I had little hope of ever finding a picture of Julia A. Maxfield’s ice-cream parlour, which was something of a repeating rural venue for the Lovecraft circle. But one has popped up at last. I’ve here colourised it. The card is still available, for a hefty price, on eBay.

Nostalgia (City Journal): Over Labor Day weekend, Twin Falls, Idaho, held a 50th anniversary celebration of the September day in 1974 when Evel Knievel tried to jump the Snake River Canyon in a steam-powered rocket. Twin Falls is a city of about 50,000 people in southern Idaho, but in 1974 it was less than half that size, and it was bracing for—and dreading—the arrival of tens of thousands to witness Knievel’s long-deferred attempt, which had been promoted in the manner of a heavyweight championship fight.

H. P. Lovecraft (Egregoric Times): H.P. Lovecraft’s letters to various associates are as fascinating as his stories.  They reveal much about the author, his approach to writing and publishing, and the historic times he lived in.  He often wrote about his dreams, shared them with his colleagues, and transmuted dream content into stories.