Popular Culture (Men’s Pulp Mags): Justin Marriott and Paul Bishop are two of my favorite pulp culture mavens. (“Pulp culture” is a term I borrowed from the book of that name by Frank M. Robinson and Lawrence Davidson and expanded to encompass both early pulp magazines and pulp art and later magazines, books and movies that have pulpy DNA, such as men’s adventure magazines and action/adventure paperbacks and movies.)

Justin is a publisher of fanzines that focus primarily on mid- to late-20th Century pulp paperbacks, including THE PAPERBACK FANATIC, THE SLEAZY READER, PULP HORROR, and MEN OF VIOLENCE.

Culture Wars (Lou Antonelli): Once the sci-fi establishment stuffed the ballot box by buying thousands of WorldCon memberships to euthanize the Sad Puppies in the 2015 Hugo vote, it assured the irrelevance of the award.

Authors (Black Gate): The 1973 Hugo Award for Best Editor went to Ben Bova. This was the first year of the Best Editor Hugo. It has been awarded every year since then, though in 2007 it was split in two, with a Best Editor Award given for Short Form and Long Form editors. This last reflected the fact that the Best Editor was a de facto award for Best Editor Short Form all along. (While I completely agree that “Long Form” editors are tremendously important to the field, and deserve recognition, I still think that the Hugo voters – even people, like me, who are pretty well connected – are not really competent to evaluate Long Form editing.)

Authors (DMR Books): The other early S&S scribe to really admire Mundy was Fritz Leiber. As he said in his glowing tribute to Mundy, “The Glory of Tros”:

“Talbot Mundy’s Tros of Samothrace is one of the half-dozen novels I have re-read most often in the course of my life, or rather during the thirty-eight years since I first devoured it. Such books inevitably become part of our lives, closely interwoven with all of our thoughts and actions…”

Fiction (Track of Words): While it carries on the naming convention started with the Age of Sigmar anthology Gods & Mortals, for which you can read my review here, Lords and Tyrants is a slightly different beast in that its 16 Warhammer 40,000 short stories have all been previously released as standalone e-shorts. I’ve read and reviewed all of these stories individually on Track of Words, and while I would love to kick back and re-read most of these, I just don’t really have time to do so.

Authors (Kairos): Most readers of this blog will have heard by now that science fiction grand master Gene Wolfe passed away last week. If you just wandered in out of the rain, you may not have heard of him.

Authors (The Federalist): Science fiction writer Gene Wolfe died on April 14 at the age of 87. Even though I consider it one the greatest science fiction novels ever written, I taught Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer (1980) for only one term, back when I was teaching my Introduction to the Literature of Fantasy and Science Fiction class. Like The Sound and the Fury and Swann’s Way, both of which it resembles in ways, it’s a hard book to teach to a general undergraduate class. And Shadow is one of the most accessible of Wolfe’s novels.

Sherlock Holmes (Factor Daily): The Science-Fictional Sherlock Holmes containing a total of seven stories, each a science fictional pastiche of Sherlock Holmes, and an introduction – ‘Sherlock Holmes and Science Fiction’ – by the mystery writer Anthony Boucher and writer of many radio dramas featuring the detective. Two of the stories featured August Derleth’s detective Solar Pons, a character inspired by and based on Sherlock Holmes.

J. R. R. Tolkien (Black Gate): The fragment begins in Pen-arduin, a suburb of Minas Tirith — indeed, the towers of the White City are descried across the waves of the Anduin River, upon whose banks the town is built. Our perspective character, Borlas, who once served as “the first Captain of the Guard of Prince Faramir,” says aloud one eventide in his garden in June, “Deep indeed run the roots of Evil.”

Robert E. Howard (Black Gate): “Red Nails” happens to be one of this writer’s favourite Conan stories, of that particular length, along with “People of the Black Circle” and “The Black Stranger” (which REH also wrote as a Black Vulmea pirate yarn, “Swords of the Red Brotherhood”).

Gaming (Speculition): I think it’s fair to say ninjas are a fascination of the West. Silent, acrobatic killers, masked, and wielding a variety of neat weapons and tools, they appear in all forms of media: books, movies, comics, tv, and beyond. And they are perfect for video games. From the early 2D action-platformer Ninja Gaiden to Sub Zero, Scorpion, and Reptile in Mortal Kombat, Shinobi 3D to all the games which feature the famous mutant, pizza-devouring turtles, ninjas have been captured in a variety of forms.

Comic Books (Porpor Books Blog): After finishing ‘James Warren: Empire of Monsters’, I did some additional online digging into the circumstances of the lawsuit filed by Bill DuBay’s nephew Ben DuBay against Stephen King.

Fiction (Vintage Pop Fictions): The Saint’s Getaway was originally published in 1932 as Getaway, although two earlier versions of the story appeared in Thriller magazine earlier that year.

Simon Templar, his beloved Patricia Holm and his pal Monty Hayward are enjoying a well-earned holiday in Innsbruck. They are lying low, or at least are supposed to be lying low, after their previous adventure

RPG (Goodman Games): We are thrilled that our Original Adventures Reincarnated line has been such a big hit. The fan reception to Into the Borderland and The Isle of Dread has been nothing short of amazing. And at Gary Con we announced the next volume in the series, Original Adventures Reincarnated #3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.