Authors (Black Gate): A Celebration of Life for Howard Andrew Jones (HAJ) was just held in Evansville, IN, Feb 22, 2025.  The event gathered friends, family, and over a dozen author colleagues. Numerous online memorials and tributes had been posted leading up to this. Links to many are listed at the bottom of the post; reading these reveals wonderful insights.

Science Fiction (Fandom Pulse): John Brunner had the chance to become the next big name in science fiction, but he disappeared for a lot of years, slowing his career and eventually bringing it to a halt before his death. What happened was a tragedy of timing, as with so many authors, where the writing business didn’t align with his life events.

Fantasy (Black Gate): I learned Andre Norton was a woman, someone told me she’d written books under her own name of Mary Norton, and that one was called The Borrowers. Turns out this wasn’t true; her original name was Alice Mary Norton, although she changed it legally to Andre Alice Norton in 1934.

Horror (Por Por Books): ‘Hobgoblin’ was issued in 1981 in hardcover, with this Berkley Books paperback (342 pp.) published in July, 1982, with stepback cover art by Mark and Stephanie Gerber.

Author Coyne (b. 1937) published a number of horror novels in the late 1970s, and throughout the 1980s. He has a fondness for using gerunds as titles.

Folklore (Frontier Partisans): The coonskin cap was once an iconic piece of American popular culture, thanks to Walt Disney’s 1950s presentation of Davy Crockett and a similar take on Daniel Boone in the long-running 1960s TV series (with both heroes portrayed by Fess Parker). The coonskin cap was not nearly as ubiquitous as mid-20th-Century depictions of frontiersmen would have us believe.

Authors (Adventures Fantastic): Today is March 6, and that means 1) it’s the anniversary of the fall of the Alamo, and 2) it’s the birthday of William F. Nolan (1928-2021).

Robert E. Howard (Black Gate): “Worms of the Earth” is my favorite story by Robert E. Howard. It features Bran Mak Morn, the last king of the Picts. Howard was fascinated with Picts, his conception of whom was largely mythological, with splashes of real world history. The Picts in his stories span Kull, Conan, Bran, James Allison, and more.

H. P. Lovecraft (Tellers of Weird Tales): I have overlooked the 100th anniversary of the real-life earthquake that brought the fictional (we hope) Cthulhu Island to the surface of the South Pacific Ocean. It happened this past weekend, February 28-March 1, 2025. The earthquake struck at 9:23:30 p.m. on February 28, 1925, off the coast of Maine.

James Bond (The Guardian): The character and plots of the original literary works by creator Ian Fleming become open for public use in most countries in 2035, raising the prospect of Bond starring in rival film and TV stories of espionage, comedy or even horror.

Music (Kairos): The more I learn about popular music, the convinced I become about 1997 being ground zero for pop culture’s decline. Like all sectors of the entertainment industry, pop music suffered a marked collapse–not just in sales, but in quality–in the late 90s.

D&D (Fandom Pulse): Sales indicators show that the new 2024 edition of Dungeons & Dragons is not performing nearly as well as its predecessors, as it appears Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro have turned off the tabletop RPG’s core fan base.

Authors (The Silver Key): Jack London is a great writer, full stop. Upon reading Martin Eden (1909) I declare he now resides firmly in my top 10 favorite authors. A list still in progress and subject to change but probably looks something like this.

Games (Walker’s Retreat): Wednesday last week, Roll For Combat came back to explain why Current Edition Is Forever Edition. “When WOTC bought Beyond, that’s when they became a software company.” That’s profound. WOTC’s business is Beyond, not D&D; because of Technical Debt, WOTC is stuck with D&D5 indefinitely because it is now cost-prohibitative, especially for a company run by Mammon Mobsters, for WOTC to make the changes that formerly happened with edition changes.

Pulp (Vintage Pop Fictions): Buccaneer Blood from Altus Press collects five rollicking pirate adventure tales by H. Bedford-Jones, all published in the pulp magazine Argosy in the early 1930s. Canadian-born H. Bedford-Jones (1887-1949) was an incredibly prolific pulp writer, mostly of adventure stories (often in historical settings) although he also wrote science fiction and westerns.

Horror (The Obelisk): Joseph Payne Brennan (1918-1990) is not one of the better-known names in weird literature. Befitting of his life, which was quiet and mostly spent working at Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library as an acquisitions librarian, Brennan’s legacy is small(ish) and only appreciated by a select few. For several decades, Brennan penned short tales and poetry for the declining pulps.

Fiction (M Porcius): On February 9 we talked about three Richard Matheson stories that were reprinted in The Shores of Space, a 1957 collection which I own.  Let’s check out three more stories from this book which is leaving a trail of glue fragments and dried paper shards all over my house.

Neil Gaiman (DMR Books): In 2020, a buddy who knew I was a major Tanith Lee fan sent me a link. It was a post from Vox Day’s Vox Popoli blog titled, “It’s not exactly plagiarism”. It was quite interesting. Vox Day–a huge fan of Lee–posited that Gaiman’s general framework for, and the general “feel” of, Sandman–The “Endless.”

Horror (Dark Worlds Quarterly): The lighthouse has always had a creepy reputation despite being no more than a short tower. I think this is largely due to the remoteness of some lighthouses. Placed on a lonely rock in the sea or on a headland, they offer the Horror writer that most necessary of factors: the bottleneck. If you have to have your characters cut off from help, what better place than a lighthouse?

Fiction (Book Graveyard): Michael Avallone was born in New York City in 1924 and died in Los Angeles in 1999. He published under his own name and seventeen pseudonyms cranking out over 200 novels. His first novel, The Tall Dolores was published in 1953 in hardcover by the Henry Holt Company and it is the first book in the Ed Noon series.

RPG (Grognardia): So, for today’s poll, I’ve presented lots of three-year periods – from 1974 to 2000 – in which readers can identify the period when they first started roleplaying. My apologies to anyone who entered the hobby from 2000 on.