D&D (Havard’s Blackmoor Blog): Jon Peterson announced at The Playing at the World Facebook Page that the new edition of his book will be ready soon:  It has been something of an epic journey since 2012. Playing at the World returns shortly in its new MIT Press edition – or at least, the first volume does.

Tolkien (Fandom Pulse): The left are losing their minds over J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings, this time because Senator J.D. Vance, Republican vice presidential nominee, said, “A lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien.” This statement triggered MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow, who unloaded on Lord of the Rings along with several of her extreme left fans.

Fantasy (Black Gate): I’m getting ready to embark on a series of posts about Philip Jose Farmer, but got distracted looking through my shelves and decided to throw in a post about the Sword & Sorcery work of Gardner F. Fox, who I mentioned here a while back for his two book S&P series set on the planet Llarn.Games (Walker’s Retreat): Jon Mollison will have a livestream tonight with at 6:00 P.M. Central Time.

Braunsteins, that not-so-missing link between wargames and RPGs, are all the rage these days, and one of the foremost authorities on those heady early days of tabletop RPGs is with us to talk about the birth – and birthing pangs – of the hobby.

History (Frontier Partisans): It would be hard to overstate the level of terror that the border of settlers of the Pennsylvania frontier were experiencing in 1756. The crushing defeat of General Edward Braddock’s expedition to take the French Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio (modern Pittsburg) on July 9, 1755, had thrown open the frontier to slashing raids by native warriors.

RPG (Jeffro’s Space Gaming): Here is where everything went wrong in rpgs: I know, it sounds reasonable. But if you ever bristled at someone invoking the phrase “write your campaign” in regard to roleplaying games, it all goes back to this. The tedious railroad adventures that nobody actually likes all go back to this one bogus idea.

Pulp (Comics Radio): I’ve written about J.D. Newsom’s Foreign Legion stories a number of times now. I read another one last night and, as usual, enjoyed it enormously. I have yet to run across a Newsom story I didn’t like.

Review (With Both Hands): There are now a number of contemporary short fiction magazines publishing sci fi, fantasy, and weird tales, and Cirsova may be pre-eminent among them. While sales of these little magazines are far below what similar publications managed in the pulp heyday, I love them for keeping great storytelling alive.

James Bond (The Book Bond): Zaffre, the flagship commercial fiction imprint of Bonnier Books UK, has won a three-way auction for a brand-new crime series expanding the Ian Fleming literary franchise, centred around the iconic character of Q from the James Bond adventures. The first book, Quantum of Menace, will be published autumn 2025.

Pulp (Mostly Old Books): A whimsical fantasy adventure with the weird inclusion of the author writing himself into the story as the hero. Berleley and his buddy meet a beautiful and mysterious woman at the zoo of all places and then are transported to the woman’s world where her tribe lead by women riding panthers and are in a battle with a tribe lead by men who ride lizards.

Horror Cinema (Art of the Movies): Woods and forests have often provided the backdrop for horror movies but few have captured the feeling of being out there, lost in the dark and stalked by unseen terrors, better than The Blair Witch Project.

Men’s Fiction (Vintage Pop Fictions): The Naked and the Deadly: Lawrence Block in Men’s Adventure Magazines, edited by Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle, collects assorted fiction and non-fiction written by Lawrence Block (sometimes using pseudonyms) for men’s adventure magazines between 1958 and 1974.

Science Fiction (M Porcius): Today we’ll read four stories from two important pulp magazines edited by John W. Campbell, Jr., three from what was long the top science fiction magazine, Astounding, a magazine associated with serious science and speculations about the future, and one from what many critics consider the finest of all fantasy magazines, Unknown.

Robert E. Howard (Paperback Warrior): After Howard’s first two published stories, “Spear and Fang” (Weird Tales, July 1925) and “In the Forest of Villefere” (Weird Tales, Aug 1925), Howard went to work writing “Wolfshead” (a sequel to “In the Forest…”), a supernatural narrative featuring a werewolf terrorizing an assortment of characters in a castle.

Fiction (Bare Bonz Sez): In the short story, “Completely Foolproof,” which was first published in the March 1958 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Joe Brisson receives a telephone call from the bank and imagines strangling his wife Lisa after he approves a request to allow her to cash a check for $5000.

Fiction (Glorious Trash): The Cult Breaker, by Andrew Sugar No month stated, 1979  Manor Books. With some serious Clint Eastwoodsploitation cover art (uncredited, but I wonder if was by Anthony “Mondo” DeStefano), The Cult Breaker comes off like the first installment of a series, but there was never a followup volume – nor was there ever another novel by author Andrew Sugar.

Science Fiction (Vintage Pop Fiction): Poul Anderson’s novella Sargasso of Lost Starships appeared in Planet Stories in January 1952. Anderson wrote a lot of fine sword-and-sorcery and sword-and-planet tales early in his career. The Sargasso of Lost Starships seems at first to be space opera, and in fact it is space opera, but as the story develops it becomes more and more of a sword-and-planet story.

D&D (Grognardia): In starting this new iteration of The Articles of Dragon, I struggled a bit with deciding when to begin. The very first issue of Dragon I remember buying for myself – from Waldenbooks, no less – was issue #62, which features a phenomenal cover painting by Larry Elmore.

Uncategorized (NBC News): The gods must be angry — or just laughing at the hubris of humanity. Authorities in Mexico have slapped a “closure” order on a 10-foot-tall (3-meter) aquatic statue of the Greek god of the sea Poseidon that was erected in May in the Gulf of Mexico just off the town of Progreso, Yucatan.

Star Trek (Reactor Mag): During its initial three-year run (1966-1969) on NBC-TV, one of the defining characteristics of Star Trek (aka Star Trek: The Original Series) was its unabashed optimism about humanity’s future and its relationship to the rest of the cosmos. Here was a science fiction series which proclaimed that by the 23^rd century, humankind would all but end war, racism, violence, personal conflict.

Early Science Fiction (SFF Rembrance): Genre SF, or indeed science fiction as a codified genre, did not exist in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s lifetime; and yet he, along with a few contemporaries, contributed massively to what we now call science fiction. Hawthorne is one of the undisputed canonical American authors, and he was also one of the first, having been born on July 4th, 1804, at a time when the US had not even started really to foster its first generation of “canonical” literature.

Magazines (Twilight Zone Vortex): Reading Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, Part 27. Volume 3, Number 5 (November, December, 1983) Cover Art: Film image from Iceman (1984).

Weird Tales (Dark Worlds Quarterly): Weird Tales published literally hundreds of stories over its original thirty-one year run. It should be no surprise that some of these stories would be adapted to other media. I’ve already discussed some of the Radio adaptations here. Comic books also used stories, often without permission or credit. This series of posts is going to look at the tales used in television.

Comic Books (Fandom Pulse): Yesterday, DC Comics revealed its new initiative called DC All In. This initiative, spearheaded by writers Scott Snyder and Joshua Williamson, is supposed to be a soft reset for DC Comics, spinning out of the summer event Absolute Power. However, with the reveals it appears as if DC Comics is simply All In on more of the same content that’s set their sales into a spiral for the last several years.