New (Cirsova): The Cirsova Winter 2022 Issue is Out Now!

Sister Winter By JOHN DAKER

On a cold night, Martin is confronted by a strange aetherial being calling itself Sister Winter! There are dangerous men looking for her, and she needs Martin’s help!
Lights By LOU NORMANN
On an isolated stretch of highway in the middle of nowhere, Jack sees a car pulled over, wrecked… then another, riddled with bullets and a police car behind it!

Firearms (Spec Op Magazine): Generally, handguns can be divided into four categories based on size: full-size, compact, subcompact, and micro. However, many models may fit into multiple categories based on their dimensions, leading to some overlap. To clarify understanding, intermediate categories may also be included in the classification.

Magazines (Sprague de Camp Fan): The Shadowed Circle is a (relatively) new Pulp Journal. After a successful Kickstarter campaign they are off and running. There have been 4 issues so far with more on the way. They are taking regular subscriptions now for either paper or digital copies.

Radio (Dark Worlds Quarterly): Here are more Old Time Radio Ghost Stories for your Yuletide pleasure. This time I stuck to actual radio performance (no readings). The stars are out, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton, to entertain you with chills and thrills. I selected classic ghost stories by familiar authors, most from the Victorians, though I have a few Pulp masterpieces too from the pages of Weird Tales. These are the tales that fill most anthologies. It is fun to hear them rather than read them. Plenty of spooky sounds and anxious narrators.

Art (Grognardia): A commenter to my earlier post pointed out that former TSR staff artist Jeff Easley was responsible for the frontispiece to issue #30 of Marvel’s Savage Sword of Conan (June 1978). I did not know this, so I poked around online for a little bit and found the image in question. The issue in which it appeared was published almost four years before Easley began work at TSR, so it’s a good example of artwork from earlier in his career and I thought others might be interested in seeing it. There are no doubt many more examples of Easley’s pre-TSR art to be found.

Fiction (Frontier Partisans): Spanning 13 years, two continents, several wars, and many smoke-filled and bloody battlefields, John Sayles’s thrilling historical and cinematic epic invites comparison with Diana Gabaldon, George R. R. Martin, Phillippa Gregory, and Charles Dickens.

Interview (Sword and Sorcery News): In what we hope to be the first of a new occasional series, Thews You Can Use asked author Christopher Rowe, who created swordandsorceryreviews.blogspot.com as an outgrowth of his ever-growing interest in S&S, to sit down with editor Curtis Ellett. Curtis is the wizard behind the curtain at one of the longest-running periodicals in the genre, Swords and Sorcery Magazine.

D&D (Grey Hawk Musings): Are the Sea Barons the guardians of the seas, the protectors of the coast? If not them, then who? We are privateers, they say. Their ships may bear letters of marque from the Overking, but a writ from Rauxes is but a piece of paper. There are those who call them pirates, regardless their letters of marque, saying that there’s little distinction between their methods and those they vie with.

Cinema (Digital Spy): Henry Cavill isn’t resting on his laurels after dropping out of Superman duties this week. A video games fan – he brought The Witcher’s Geralt of Rivia to life, after all – the actor took to Instagram today (December 16) with a major piece of news. Next to an animation of a Warhammer 40,000 sigil, he wrote to over 23 million fans: “For 30 years I have dreamt of seeing a Warhammer universe in live action.

Games (Future War Stories): While I attempt to gain new insight into the world of Stargate SG-1 staff weaponry, I thought we would have another installment of the Forgotten Military SF video games…number nine to be correct. On this list are a few I am very familiar with and a few I never heard of….

Games (Pocket Lint): Over the last decade or so, Japanese developer FromSoftware has completely restructured what we expect from combat-focussed RPGs thanks to its Dark Souls games. Its longer-running series, though, is actually Armored Core, a mech combat game that it’s been making for years, albeit with no title appearing since the PS3 and Xbox 360. Now, it’s back – find out everything you should know about Armored Core VI, below.

Warhammer (Track of Words): Every year, as we approach the end of December I look back at the best Black Library books I’ve read over the preceding twelve months, and it’s time now to take a look at 2022’s BL highlights. There are plenty to choose from, but I’ve narrowed it down to just five that I can personally recommend as being genuinely fantastic reads. It was hard to cut things down to five though.

Fiction Genre (Twilight GM): I like dieselpunk a lot. I want other people to like it. Having said that, the major hurdle is to make it look retro in a way that appeals to people in the Twenty-first Century. That isn’t much of a hurdle to be honest. The artwork of the period and the machines have their share of fans. There’s a ton of reference images and there is a slew of wild inventions and vehicles documented and photographed. ATM interplanetary travel is neither diesel nor atom punk. As this focusses on interplanetary travel I’,m going with Planetpunk!.

Cinema (Kairos): Bennett’s first step was to go back and watch the original Star Trek TV series from start to finish. Convinced that the first movie lacked a compelling villain, he combed through each episode with an eye to finding just the right bad guy to drive the sequel.

Review (Wasteland & Sky): I reviewed author and musician David V. Stewart’s Eyes in the Walls a while back. This was a story, not unlike my own, focused on the time period of the ’90s and those who lived in it. I highly recommend reading that story to anyone interested in the subject. It really does evoke that time and place to tell its tale. I’m not going to spoil the ending here, but there really isn’t any other way it could conclude. That was simply how the 1990s were.

Art (Comic Book Stories) Gallery of Saturday Evening Post Christmas covers:

Life Skills (Art of Manliness): How to Make the Perfect Snowball: An Illustrated Guide

Authors (DMR Books): Please introduce yourself and tell us about your background as a writer.
I’m Jim Breyfogle, and I write speculative fiction. I wrote The Tales of the Mongoose & Meerkat and The Paths of Cormanor. I lean heavily into fantasy fiction, but often bits and pieces of other genres find their way in.

Review (Caroline Furlong): Finally! I finally got to read a John C. Wright novel! I have an earlier book by him but have yet to crack that open, because…well, if you saw my bookshelves, you would understand why. A previous book written by him which I reviewed was an audiobook and a critique of The Last Jedi, so it does not count as reading his fiction.

RPG (Akratic Wizardry): The adventure will start in the year 1964 of the Third Age. It will take place in north-central Eriador, specifically the contested lands between the Kingdom of Arthedain and the Witch-King’s Realm of Angmar. 1964 is the first year of the reign of King Arvedui. The Dúnadan Seer Malbeth foretold that Arvedui would be the last ruler of Arthedain. But does this mean that Arthedain ultimately will fall to the Witch-King’s hordes, or instead that Arvedui will defeat Angmar and resurrect the greater realm of Arnor?

Streaming (Arkhaven Comics): Willow is a BOLD REIMAGINING of LucasFilm’s 1988 garbage-tier Tolkien feature of the same name. I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t made for me. It was a kids’ show for younger Gen-Xers and baby Millennials. This meant I had to watch a movie that I didn’t really like when it first came out. For those that never watched or whose brain just chooses not to remember like mine, here’s the plot for the original.

RPG (Walker’s Retreat): I had that supplement. It was useless for actual play. Lots of lore that wasn’t going to see the light of day, information that most players would never bother to ask after, and other things that had sweet fuck-all to do with what is relevant to running a campaign. Instead, it was there to give non-players something to read, act as part of a backdoor Series Bible for hired novelists (and later other media), and push the idea of Official Writ from the publisher being more important to the campaign than the users themselves.

Edgar Rice Burroughs (Rough Edges): THE MAN-EATER is a short novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs that was serialized in the newspaper The New York Evening World in November 1915. Based on an unsold movie treatment, it never appeared in book form during Burroughs’ lifetime but eventually was reprinted in a double volume with another short novel, BEYOND THIRTY. Since then it’s appeared in numerous e-book versions, one of which I just read.

Pulp (Pulp Flakes): The Street & Smith plant, for instance, located at 79-89 Seventh Avenue, is so far away from most of the other publishing establishments that an airplane could very profitably be used in getting from one to the other, provided there were any place to land. Fiction House, Inc., is about the nearest to it, being only four or five miles farther up the island of Manhattan. Then to get to the headquarters of the Clayton Publications, from which emanate Ace-High Magazine, Cowboy Stories, etc., one must trek across the city from 461 Eighth avenue (the address of Fiction House. Inc.) to 799 Broadway, a considerable distance even as the crow flies.

Weird Tales (Pulpfan): A police detective tells Jules de Grandin about some curious recent deaths:  well to do young men are being found dead, by their own hands, even though they have nothing to despair over. At the scenes of the crimes, the detective has noted the exact same, distinctive incense. De Grandin has encountered a similar scent in the course of his travels and adventures. De Grandin and Towbridge, a little later, happen to encounter and stop a man from committing suicide by throwing himself off the bridge. They experience the smell that had previously been described. The young man provides the backstory:

Myths (Unz): Atlantis may be the most significant myth in our culture after that of the Holy Grail. The folk memory of a lost homeland, a primordial origin, and a fall from grace seems to echo in our blood. Plato may have been using Atlantis as metaphor, but many think there really was an advanced empire destroyed in a cataclysm long ago. The myth could easily refer to a lost homeland in the far north, not just one in the Atlantic.

Strange Stuff (Glorious Trash): I mean who would’ve thought there were enough men’s adventure mag stories to fill up a 300+ page book on Bigfoot, the Yeti, and sea creatures? But thankfully Bob Deis is around now, and Cryptozoology Anthology is another must-buy offering from his “Men’s Adventure Library” line.

Crime Fiction (A Hot Cup of Pleasure): Usually when I read a mystery, I want the criminal to be punished and the moral-order restored. Usually. Because at times, I find myself rooting for the criminal and hoping that he escapes the long-arm of justice. In this anthology of short stories, all the criminals escape justice (or rather not but I will come to that later) Divided into five Departments: Of Murderers, Thieves, Confidence Men, Criminal Lawyers, and Assorted Crooks, the anthology contains thirty-one stories in all.

James Bond (Bookgasm): The prolific crime novelist began his professional writing career as many scribes do: at the college paper. Whereas I had to report on the facility management department at the University of Oklahoma, Goldberg leveraged UCLA’s ink to write about his first love: 007, if you haven’t guessed by now. The resulting interviews and articles from those pages — as well as Starlog, Cinefantastique and Prevue magazines — come collected in the slim, but satisfying The James Bond Films 1962-1989: Interviews with the Actors, Writers and Producers.

Weird Western (Marzaat): Things aren’t looking good for Porter Rockwell and his friend Quincy Jackson at the beginning of this novel. The girl Emily was dragged over a cliff and into the Colorado River by Mala Cosa’s dead body at the end of Crazy Horses, and Territorial Marshal Shaw is going to use the lack of her exculpatory testimony and other evidence he’s forged, suborned, or misinterpreted to send Rockwell and Jackson to the gallows.

Western (Paperback Warrior): After enjoying Clair Huffaker’s (1926-1990) paperback western Seven Ways from Sundown, I was anxious to read another of his books. My biggest obstacle is quantity – I just don’t own many of his novels. The other ones I own are a ratty copy of War Wagon, which was adapted into the John Wayne/Kirk Douglas film, and a 1975 Futura paperback edition of Posse from Hell, originally published by Fawcett Gold Medal in 1958. I opted for the latter in hopes that it would be as good as Seven Ways from Sundown. News flash – it was much better!