Science Fiction (William Emmons Books): This installment of the Official William Emmons Books Newsletter is a look at the October 1949 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. I’ll be getting into the meat of the issue in this post. But since this is the first full issue of Astounding I’ve reviewed here, I’ll start by laying down some background on where this issue fits into the long life of Astounding.

Pulp (Rough Edges): I’ve gotten interested in the obscure pulp author Henry Treat Sperry, probably because when I looked him up on the Fictionmags Index, I noticed something odd. His first published story was “Hands Beyond the Grave” in the September 1934 issue of TERROR TALES, the first issue of that iconic Weird Menace pulp.

Pastiche (Sprague de Camp Fan): The Banquet of Souls” by Steven Savile is the second Solomon Kane adventure in this Heroic Legends e-book series. Beside these two e-books put out by Titan Books, there were at least two other non-Robert E. Howard Solomon Kane tales published fairly recently. One by Nancy Collins and one by Paul De Filippo.

Comic Books (Por Por Books): ‘John Carter: Warlord of Mars’ omnibus was issued by Marvel in 2012. At 626 pages, it’s a mid-sized omnibus, as these things go. It contains all 28 issues of the ‘John Carter: Warlord of Mars’ comic book Marvel published from June, 1977, to October, 1979, along with the 1979 Annual. There is a brief Afterward which consists of scans of original sketches, and promotional materials.

Weird Tales (M Porcius): The May 1939 issue of Weird Tales includes the first installment of the serialized version of Robert E. Howard’s Almuric, a fun novel I read while living in Iowa, shortly before I started this blog.  There is also a story by Henry Kuttner, “The Watcher at the Door,” which I thought was just OK when I read it back in 2021.  There’s a poem by H. P. Lovecraft, “Harbor Whistles,” which isn’t bad,

Copyrights (Icv2): Copyrights on key works that launched intellectual properties into pop culture are expiring in the next few years, including Conan, according to an updated report from License Global, which lists key IPs on which copyrights are expiring in the coming years, as they hit 95 years after initial release.  Some of them are especially important in the world of geek culture.

Weird Tales (Tellers of Weird Tales): “The Thing of a Thousand Shapes,” written by Otis Adelbert Kline, was the first serial to appear in Weird Tales. Part one was in the first issue, dated March 1923. Part two followed in April of that year. At the opening of part one, the narrator learns that his uncle has died. That would make “The Thing of a Thousand Shapes” the first “Uncle story” in Weird Tales.

RPG (Grognardia): When I was a child, I owned a copy of the Marvel Treasury Special adaptation of 2001 by Jack Kirby. I can’t recall how I acquired it, though I suspect it was a gift by a well-meaning relative who knew that I liked science fiction. I am certain that I read the comic before I ever saw the movie (which wasn’t released on home video until 1980).

D&D (Walker’s Retreat): The problem is that these Boomers (a) have no legal rights to the works they made so (b) lawfare is a waste of time and money. They sold off their creations to one or another of a souless corpo so they could continue fucking around. No longer owning what they made, they now act indignant that the owner of that property exercises their rights to do whatever they want with it.

Review (Black Gate): It’s June of 2024, and Titan Books has just delivered John C. Hocking’s City of the Dead which contains both Conan and the Emerald Lotus (1995, TOR) and its follow-up Conan and the Living Plague — a book lost in the limbo of publishing craziness for ~two decades! Hocking also wrote a bridging novella set in between these two novels called “Black Starlight” (serialized across Conan comics in 2019, and provided assembled as an eBook in 2023 as Conan: Black Starlight: The Heroic Legends Series).

New (Wasteland & Sky): The good news is just in time for the start of summer is the third volume in StoryHack’s Sidearm & Sorcery anthology series! It’s quite the release. For those looking for a fun read, you won’t get much better than this.

Popular Culture (Kairos): Where did all the hipsters go? You may have noticed, as author JD Cowan did, that the hipsters who once infested the cultural landscape seem to have vanished overnight.

Pulp (Black Gate): Black Mask’s major competition came in the form of Dime Detective Magazine, which touted itself as “twice as good – for half the price” (Black Mask cost 20 cents at the time; though the price would shortly drop to 15 cents, in part due to Dime Detective’s success at the cheaper cost).

Pulp (Don Herron): Doing some email with noted book and pulp collector Kevin Cook, the topic of Ed Price’s collection of pulp era memoirs came up — in particular the bibliography of Price’s own pulp fictioneering that appears in the book.

Robert E. Howard (Frontier Partisans): Most folks think of Howard as a fantasy writer, for obvious reasons, but I have long considered him a writer of frontiers — from the Pictish Wilderness to Africa, to Arabia, to Afghanistan, to the deep piney woods and swamps of Louisiana and Arkansas, and back to his native Texas. Those who are only familiar with Conan often don’t know that REH wrote Westerns.

Science Fiction (Dark Worlds Quarterly): Before the Death Star, there were Berserkers. I am talking visually, of course. Star Wars‘ Death Star is a human-built and run machine. A very large one, a base armed with a killer laser. Fred Saberhagen gave us the image of the large spherical death machine that can blast a planet, killing all life there. I don’t know if George Lucas had the Berserkers in mind. (He borrowed from Jack Williamson, Frank Herbert and Edgar Rice Burroughs, for sure.)

Robert E. Howard (Paperback Warrior): Robert E. Howard’s 16th century Puritan hero Solomon Kane made his first appearance in the August, 1928 issue of Weird Tales. The stories that feature the character are a good mix of sword-and-sorcery and horror, and I really enjoyed my first experience with the character in “Skulls in the Stars”.

RPG (DMR Books): I’m very excited to announce that my first properly published RPG module, The Lair of the Brain Eaters, is now available! Brain Eaters is a sword-and-sorcery-themed old school dungeon crawl for use with the Lamentations of the Flame Princess game system.

Spy Fiction (Book Graveyard): The Assignment Series, all written by Edward S Aarons, had 42 entries from 1955 to 1976. The series was an espionage thriller adventure series starring Sam Durell. Durell is a no-nonsense CIA man. There’s no cheeky in his spy. We don’t know if he likes his martini’s shaken or stirred and he has zero funky gadgets to get him through a mission.

Westerns (Fandom Pulse): You see, people form their media habits as… children. And if you haven’t made a family-friendly western since 2011’s Rango (Does it even count?), then you’re unlikely to cultivate that all-important new generation of fans. Older fans have enough westerns, both true and deconstructive, in their backlogs to watch. They certainly don’t need more of the deliberately demoralizing renditions we’ve seen like that awful dull and dour anthology The Ballad of Buster Skruggs.