Pastiche (Screen Rant): Conan the Barbarian and Solomon Kane will be featured in upcoming novels from Titan Books, and ScreenRant has a first look at what’s to come. Created by Robert E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian and Solomon Kane first debuted nearly a century ago, with Kane first appearing in a pulp magazine in 1928 and Conan the Barbarian showing up a few years later in the 1930s.

Publishing (Fandom Pulse): One of the biggest traps for authors in science fiction and fantasy publishing is I.P. tie-in work. The system is designed to use and spit out authors without them having much to show for their hard work, and now Star Wars author Delilah S. Dawson has posted an expose on how little reward there is for the work for hire in publishing.

Games (Razorfist Rants): Gaming’s Triple-A-pocalypse Has Arrived! Pronouns are not Profits. Who knew?

Pulp (Fear in Four Colors): The Mysterious Traveler was a radio show produced by the Mutual Broadcasting Company. Created by writer Robert Arthur, it ran from 1943-1952. The popular character also appeared in his own pulp magazine for five issues and several comic books.

New (Don Herron): The newest of the new is the eBook LitCrit Megapack Death Lit — a selection of essays and reviews from my fifty years as a critic and commentator in the blood-soaked arenas of horror and the supernatural, mystery and detection. 1974-2024. I think the material gathered is what they call a Body of Work.

Games (Kairos): Everybody credits Nintendo with reviving–and reshaping–the video game industry. But the Big N’s impact extends far beyond games. Over the years, Nintendo has transformed the retail sector, influencing how businesses manage inventory and how consumers interact with the marketplace. And the revolution has been so thorough, you probably never stop to think about it.

Comic Books (Rip Jagger Dojo): The Viking Prince is a creation by Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert. The majority of the stories in this terrific little run were written though by Bob Haney and Bill Finger. Kubert is the artist throughout, though Irv Novick supplies many of the covers featuring the character. The feature debuted in the pages of The Brave and the Bold as part of a trio of features starring heroes from sundry historical eras.

Games (Swordslore): A lot of gamers around my age name Mass Effect as a game they grew up with. I knew of it around the time it was popular in the early 2010s and was even offered it a once as a Christmas gift but turned it down. To me at the time, it didn’t really fit what I wanted out of an RPG.

Toys (Pop Culture Safari!):

Games (Auron MscIntyre): The newest BioWare game Dragon Age: The Veilguard is comically woke, but the company has a long history of inserting progressive themes into its products. In fact, BioWare games were so woke that they helped to fuel the initial GamerGate movement.

Pastiche (Sprague de Camp Fan): Starting in June 2005 and ending in December 2006, Ace Fantasy ambitiously released a dozen Age of Conan novels. The books looked fantastic. A great logo with raised letters on the first six books and cover art by Justin Sweet on all twelve of them. Even the spines were impressive.

Tolkien (Nerd of the Rings): The Dunlendings & Dunland

History (The Past): The story of Roman Carlisle is a tale not of two cities but of two forts. Having brought much of southern England under imperial control in the years after the Claudian invasion of AD 43, in the AD 70s the Roman army surged north, annexing swathes of new territories and consolidating these gains by building forts within them.

Fiction (Mewsings): I was immediately intrigued by this anthology of all-new stories set in the world of Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood. I wavered a bit over reading it, at first, as generally I’m not so much into fictional worlds as I am the works of individual creators, but all the same I was intrigued to see what other writers might make of Holdstock’s ideas, when there’s so much to explore.

Fantasy (Glitternight): THE MARVELOUS LAND OF OZ (1904) – We’ve all been exposed to countless variations of the adventures of Dorothy Gale and company in Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). Therefore I’m starting my reviews of the Oz books with the second in the series – The Marvelous Land of Oz.

History (Tikhistory): It is obvious that National Socialism is a religion, but the exact God that Hitler worshipped has not been confirmed. Some think he was a Christian, a Buddhist, or even an Atheist… but it turns out that all we had to do was go back and read the ‘first’ book written by a National Socialist (Rudolf Jung) to confirm exactly which God was Hitler’s God.

Fantasy (Imaginative Conservative): This understanding of the indissoluble marriage of faith and reason animates the greatest writers of fantasy fiction. This is why Tolkien can say that fairy stories hold up a mirror to man. They show us ourselves, not merely physically but metaphysically. They show us who we are, who we should be and who we shouldn’t be.

Comic Books (Grim Dark Magazine): For the first time, Elric the Necromancer will be printed in English! Adapted from the stories by, and with approval from, Michael Moorcock, this features his character Elric – who must face an epic threat without his legendary Stormbringer. Originally published in French, this is the first time the tale has been translated into English.

Games (Kairos): The tabletop roleplaying game industry has grown significantly over the past decade, fueled by blockbuster franchises, mainstream exposure, and the popularity of series like Critical Role. But this explosive growth has come with a price, particularly the loss of longtime fans who feel alienated by the companies they once supported.

Fiction (Rough Edges): “The ‘Iblis’ at Ludd” is the third story featuring Talbot Mundy’s most famous character, Major James Schuyler Grim, better known as Jimgrim, an American adventurer who’s a member of the British intelligence service in the perilous days following the First World War.

Crusades (Real Crusades History): Did Bohemond seduce a Turkish princess?

Radio (Old Time Radio): Lights Out 1930s, 1940s.

Crime Fiction (Marzaat): In 1942, Hollywood sought Chandler out to be a scriptwriter. His first work was adopting James M. Cain’s novella Double Indemnity. Chandler remarked that the process taught him all he was capable of learning about writing screenplays – and probably shortened his life. The film Double Indemnity was, as the cliché goes, a critical and financial success.

Ghost Fiction (Wormwoodiana): Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales from Daniel Defoe to Algernon Blackwood, published in December 1924, is a small pocket-sized book of some 506 pages plus some xvi pages of front-matter.

Cryptozoology (MDCLS): Bernard Heuvelmans is considered to be the “Father of Cryptozoology” due mostly to the release of this book. It’s a loose piece of wishful thinking that establishes itself on the premise that, if we can re-discover some creatures that were thought extinct, then might there not be more such critters out there that we haven’t spotted yet?

Fiction (Frontier Partisans): It’s a reprint of a historical novel from the 1980s. Somehow, I had never heard of this tale, based on a 65-page memoir of a Jacobean Englishman’s misadventures on the west coast of Africa c. 1613. Apparently, this is a feast of a novel, and I shall be delving in this winter…

Cinema (Grimdark Magazine): Whilst not a grimdark film, Godzilla Minus One has a dark tale and conflicted characters that will appeal to this audience. It plays things straight, starting off at the end of World War II as kamikaze pilot Kōichi Shikishima fakes a fault on his plane and lands on Odo Island. There he encounters the terrifying dinosaur-like creature of Godzilla who attacks the garrison on the island. Kōichi is asked to shoot from his plane but he panics and is knocked unconscious.

Fiction (Paperback Warrior): Shortly before Cormac McCarthy’s death in 2023 he received a passionate letter from a French artist named Manu Larcenet. In the letter, Larcenet explained how he had read the author’s most prescient novel, The Road, over and over for six months. He pleaded with McCarthy and explained how he had almost lived in the book’s bleak narrative for months.

Sherlock Holmes (Wormwoodiana): Arthur Machen suspected that he was not invited to contribute to the flagship journal of the Eighteen Nineties, The Yellow Book, by its editor Henry Harland, after he had praised Conan Doyle’s The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893) while sitting next to Harland at a dinner.

D&D (Black Gate): My Dungeons and Dragons roots don’t go back to the very beginning, but I didn’t miss it by much. I remember going to our Friendly Local Gaming Store with my buddy. He would buy a shiny TSR module and I would get a cool Judges Guild supplement. And I remember how D&D was the center of the RPG world in those pre-PC/video game playing days.

Art (John Coulthart): To look at any of the cartoons drawn for the New Yorker by Richard Taylor (1902–1970) you wouldn’t suspect that the Canadian artist had spent a few years at the end of the 1950s creating a handful of book covers for Arkham House. I’ve never read much about the history of August Derleth’s publishing endeavours so I can’t say how Taylor came to be offered this work. An unlikely choice he may have been but he did a better job with his five covers than many of the artists in the 60s and 70 who attempted to illustrate the eldritch horrors of Lovecraft, Derleth and co.

Pulp (Dark Worlds Quarterly): “The Fire Princess” only has one monster in it, a race of dead aliens called “The Ancient Ones” but Hamilton doesn’t disappoint. We’ll get to them soon enough. The tale is set during a time when the countries of Europe and America are trying to influence as much territory in Asia as possible. Because of this, our main characters, the outsiders anyway, are all spies. Gary Martin, our hero, is an American working in Asia as a paleontologist. He’s not looking for dinosaurs but secrets.

RPG (Black Gate): Designed by brothers Glenn and Kenneth Rahman, it’s from the time just before D&D had fully exploded into some approaching mass popularity and TSR was still connected to its board and wargaming roots. The Rahmans developed Divine Right from an earlier, unpublished game of theirs called Your Excellency.

Fiction (Isegoria): I’ve been slowly working my way through Tom Clancy’s works in publication order — I commented on Patriot Games and the next few novels a few years ago — and I just got around to listening to the audiobook version of Debt of Honor.