Note: Sensor Sweep will be mid-week next week instead of Monday.

Authors (Goodman Games): Howard Andrew Jones passed away on Thursday, January 16, 2025. Howard was a wonderful man and a good friend. He had a rare spirit that threw off sparks of joy for anyone who loved books as he did. I love books a lot, and Howard loved them even more.

Tolkien (The Silver Key): In Blogging the Silmarillion I talked a lot about the problems Tolkien explores within his broader legendarium: Death, and the pursuit of deathlessness. Power, and possessiveness. Loving the works of one’s hands too much. But I wrote comparatively little on the answers offered in The Silmarillion.

Weird Tales (Tellers of Weird Tales): Francis Hard was Farnsworth Wright. He used that pseudonym while writing stories and poems for magazines of which he was the editor. You could call it a conflict of interest for an editor to place his own works in a publication that he edits. I don’t see it that way.

Review (Grim Dark Magazine): Conan: City of the Dead is a deluxe omnibus packaging of two pastiche novels by sword & sorcery veteran John C. Hocking: the fan favorite Conan and the Emerald Lotus and its long-awaited sequel Conan and the Living Plague. Conan and the Emerald Lotus was originally published by Tor Books in 1995 and has been out of print for roughly two decades.

D&D (Sorcerer’s Skull): So what do I mean by ergodic? Well, Greyhawk in its initial present is brief, which is often touted as a virtue, but in that brevity its ability to develop an easy sense of place is impaired. It also consistently refuses to take the modern route of focusing on “juicy” details or hooks.

Cinema (Grognardia): I’m pretty sure the first David Lynch movie I ever saw was his 1984 adaptation of Dune, which I’ve always adored for its esthetics, if not necessarily anything else. Lynch hated every released version of the movie and even replaced his name with that of Alan Smithee on a couple of them.

Authors (The Silver Key): he news is out, and it is terrible though not unexpected. Howard Andrew Jones, author of The Desert of Souls, the Hanuvar chronicles, and former editor of Tales from the Magician’s Skull, passed away yesterday following a short battle with brain cancer.

Fiction (Pulp Super Fan): In the world of sword-and-sorcery fiction, one of the best-known series is Fritz Leiber‘s (1910-92) Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series. Leiber, along with Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, is considered one of the founders of sword and sorcery.

Greyhawk (Greyhawk Grognard): I talk about the history of the (several) Castles Greyhawk.

Tolkien (Whatifalthist): The Philosophy and History Behind Lord of the Rings.

Fiction (Fantasy Literature): Horror authority Jack Sullivan, writing in the Jones & Newman book, tells us, regarding Campbell’s oeuvre, “Dark Feasts is the book to get, for the simple reason that it has more first-rate Campbell tales than any other single volume.”

Comic Books (50 Year Old Comic Books): In 1974, star comics artist Neal Adams had largely turned away from pencilling comic book stories.  But he did keep his hand in in the field in various ways, such as by turning out painted covers for Marvel Comics’ black-and-white magazine line on a fairly regular basis.  The second issue of Marvel’s new Savage Sword of Conan title is graced by one such.

Cinema (Comics Old Time Radio): It’s through this channel that I discovered 1955’s Storm Fear. Dan Duryea plays Fred,  a failed author who has brought his wife and kid to a remote mountain cabin because of his health. He has a lung disease and the mountain air is supposedly good for him.

Myth (Raymond Ibrahim): The true, documented story of a dragon that plagued the island of Rhodes as late as the 14th century — until the Crusader Knights of St. John turned their attention to it.

Fanzines (Dark Worlds Quarterly): Fanzines are just that, magazines made by fans. They offer a place for new writers to see their ideas and words in print even if they don’t make any money. The fanzines began as part of First Fandom, that movement that sprang from Hugo Gernsback’s letter column in Amazing Stories. As Lester Del Rey puts it in World of Science Fiction (1979):

Art (Silver Key): I don’t wish to discuss Rob’s musical legacy (some excellent stuff, but very uneven), nor his cinematic work (I haven’t seen enough to have an opinion). No, I’d like to examine his creative endeavors in the realm of graphic arts.

Writing (Black Gate): An author friend of 70+ books told me that a novel is just “one damned thing after another.” This is a layman’s way of saying that a book needs “narrative drive.” Narrative drive keeps readers turning the pages. It exerts a pull that drags the reader along. Edgar Rice Burroughs was the master of narrative drive. Things are happening on every page of his books that keep you wanting to know more.

Fiction (Wertzone): Of course, mega-long novels are not published in the industry that often, so the individual novel list hasn’t changed very much. The main change has been adjusting the positions of Brandon Sanderson’s novels based on updated word counts and adding his latest volume, Wind & Truth, which was published since the previous list was published.

Awards (REH Foundation): We are pleased to announce the opening of nominations for the 2025 Robert E. Howard Awards starting on January 13, 2025.

Appendix N (Goodman Games): We begin with a name that might not be familiar to all weird fiction fans but was certainly known by Gary Gygax—William Hope Hodgson. Hodgson was critically praised during his lifetime, but his works fell out of the public eye in the years following his death. Even today, Hodgson remains a peripheral figure to genre fans with few being familiar with his work.

T.V. (Spy Command): I Spy, which debuted in the fall of 1965, was both an entertaining spy show as well as a socially important series. The show paired Robert Culp and Bill Cosby as a pair of American agents. Kelly Robinson (Culp) and Alexander Scott (Cosby) had an unusual cover — a “tennis bum” (a talented amateur player who often was a guest of rich people) and his trainer.

H. P. Lovecraft (Skull Sessions): Will Murray and I discuss his long and varied career writing for Marvel Comics and magazines. He brought to life classics of the pulp age like The Shadow, The Spider, and Doc Savage (many of whose creators he personally met) and continued the legacy of one of my all-time favorites, HP Lovecraft. Including a few insights about Lovecraft’s cosmic horror mythos!

Westerns (Western Genre Musings): Selected as one of the 100 Best Western Novels by editor Jon Lewis. This 1918 is a curious choice as it does, indeed, take place in the West, Nebraska to be specific, it is more a tale of farmers and small-town immigrant life than it is a Western in the cattleman, six-shooter, big climax sense.

Fiction (Skulls in the Stars): I have long been a fan of the work of Henry Kuttner, who was perhaps the most versatile of the later pulp fiction authors that followed in the wake of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. I’ve written about his works many times before on this blog: he wrote science fiction, pulp adventure, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, and more. This includes, with wife and regular collaborator C.L. Moore, what I consider to be one of the best science fiction stories of all time, Private Eye.

Fiction (Pulp Super Fan): This year we got a new Solar Pons collection from Belanger Books that finally takes him to the United States: The American Adventures of Solar Pons. Edited by David Marcum the collection features a dozen stories by various authors.

Horror (Skulls in the Stars): A lot of horror novels work by being unpredictable, and providing a lot of twists and turns that keeps the reader guessing — and shocked — throughout their run. Others, however, have a sense of doomed inevitability to them, where the reader knows with near certainty that doom is approaching, and the book is all about following that painful path to the horrific end.

Pulp (Glorious Trash): The Spider #30: Green Globes Of Death, by Grant Stockbridge March, 1936  Popular Publications. I was under the impression this volume of The Spider was the third part of a trilogy that started with The Mayor Of Hell and continued into Slaves Of The Murder Syndicate, but that doesn’t turn out to be the case. Green Globes Of Death is for the most part self-contained, with only infrequent mentions of those previous two volumes.

History (Frontier Partisans): Marcus Brotherton’s non-fiction book, A Bright and Blinding Sun, is the story of Joe Johnson, Jr. It follows him from early childhood to the end of his life, but it centers on his time in the Philippines before and during the Second World War.

D&D (Black Gate): On the eve of Gary’s Gygax’s birthday, July 26, 2019, I was in sunny California getting ready to be interviewed by the Dorks of Yore for their documentary, The Dreams in Gary’s Basement: Gary Gygax and the Creation of Dungeons & Dragons.

History (Metatron): The movie The Woman King has been the subject of all sorts of controversy in the last few weeks. On this video I’ll tell you about what’s going on and most importantly I’ll give you a historical channel’s perspective on the historicity of this movie.

D&D (Grognardia): From the moment Gary Gygax first announced that his upcoming revision to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons would include, among other additions, a collection of new character classes, my younger self was waiting with eager anticipation for any news about what these classes might be or what abilities they might possess.

Authors (Grognardia): I am that spawn of witch and demon By time’s mad prophets long foretold:

Science Fiction (Isegoria): I recently went back and read “Black Destroyer,” a science fiction short story by Canadian-American writer A. E. van Vogt, first published in Astounding SF in July 1939 and later combined with several other short stories to form the novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle.