Science Fiction (Rough Edges): As author Robert Silverberg explains in his introduction to the 1979 Ace reprint of CONQUERORS FROM THE DARKNESS, the story first saw life as a novella, “Spawn of the Deadly Sea”, in the April 1957 issue of the SF digest SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES.

Games (The Lotus Eaters): Unbisoft’s Downward Spiral.

Beer (Imaginative Conservative): “Craft beer is the strangest, happiest economic story in America,” writes the article’s author, Derek Thompson. In an age of monopoly, in which a handful of companies control the bulk of the market, the craft brewing industry is bucking the trend. As recently as 2012, two duopolistic companies, Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors controlled almost ninety percent of beer production.

Fiction (Cirsova): Mankind and its empire spanning the Nine Worlds are ruled by a powerful triumvirate of long-lived dreamers: the Dream Lords! The Dream Lords project a vision of utopia to obfuscate the alien hostility of Zurjah, the world long claimed to be the true seat of humanity. A vision that grows hazy as the power of the Dream Lords wanes.

Horror (Por Por Books): ‘The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XIII’ (251 pp.) is DAW Book No. UE 2086, and Book Collector’s No. 608. It was published in October, 1985, and has fine cover art by Michael Whelan. This is the 12th ‘Year’s Best Horror Stories’ volume I’ve reviewed here at the PorPor Books Blog, so I pretty much know what to expect with volume XIII.

Popular Culture (Nerdrotic): HERE WE GO AGAIN! Toxic Fandom Blamed For Star Wars DOWNFALL… THEY ARE CLUELESS!

Pulp (Comics Radio): I’ve now written often enough about J.D. Newsom’s Foriegn Legion stories, I wish I’d given these posts a clever series name. A few months ago, I declared Newsom’s 1935 tale “Grenades for the Colonel” my favorite. But now I may change my mind. “Mud,” published in the December 30, 1925 issue of Adventure, is fantastic.

Poetry (Frontier Partisans): There was a time not so very long ago when poetry was a “thing.” People of my grandparents’ and even parents’ generation often had reams of memorized poetry at their command. Lady Marilyn’s father Allen recited Robert W. Service with great enthusiasm at the drop of a hat.

Space Opera (Dark Worlds Quarterly): Brian Aldiss once said in an anthology called Space Opera (1974): “Science fiction is for real. Space Opera is for fun. Generally.” And for the most part, I agree. That “Generally” is for cases like Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) that are both real and space opera. What SF novel did a better job of discussing the environment, petroleum politics, religion and war? And do it with a space adventure?

Fantasy (Kairos): In recent years, the rise of intricate, well-defined magic systems—exemplified by Brandon Sanderson’s work—has led many aspiring authors to believe that a detailed set of rules governing magical abilities is essential for crafting compelling fantasy. While Sanderson’s approach to magic has proven highly successful, not every fantasy story benefits from such a framework.

Poe (DMR Books): I seriously dropped the ball, sword-brothers. I missed the one-hundredth and seventy-fifth anniversary of the day when—in the lonesome October—Edgar Allan Poe mysteriously passed beyond this mortal coil. The anniversary of such a literary titan shall not go unrecognized, albeit belatedly.

Tolkien (Notion Club Papers): I reviewed the new edition of JRR Tolkien’s selected letters earlier this year; and I saw at the time that the whole thing was also available as an audiobook – which was a mammoth twenty-nine hours yet cost me just one “Audible” credit to buy (less than five pounds).

Horror (Paperback Warrior): Herbert Lieberman’s 1971 novel Crawlspace manages to check all of the boxes. The author specialized in crime-fiction and horror, churning out 14 novels between 1967 and 2003. Crawlspace was originally published by David McKay, but was later published multiple times by Pocket Books. The book sold well and was adapted into a made-for-television film that broadcast on CBS in 1972. 

Tolkien (European Lore): The Embarrassing “Tolkien Professor” Says “There is NO Canon In Tolkien”

Fantasy (DMR Books): The other day, I saw—yet again—something online about how H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain was “the inspiration” behind Indiana Jones. I’m a huge Haggard fan, but Quatermain was emphatically not an archaeologist, even by nineteenth century standards. That got me thinking about A. Merritt—an HRH fan—and his impressive stable of fictional ‘adventurer archaeologists’.

H. P. Lovecraft (Tentaclii): An Italian Lovecraftian this week points out that Lovecraft and Barlow did alarmist ‘global warming’ fiction first, with their tale “Till A’ the Seas” (January 1935, for the Californian Summer 1935 issue). The Earth is slipping imperceptibly closer to the Sun, in their fictional future-scenario, and heating up accordingly.

RPG (Grognardia): Designed by Timothy B. Brown and Troy Denning, Dark Sun was presented as “a world ravaged by sorcery” and “the most challenging AD&D game world yet.” This new setting took inspiration from both the post-apocalyptic and Dying Earth sub-genres, with a dash of Burroughsian sword-and-planet for good measure.

H. P. Lovecraft (Classic Horror Blog): Like so many of his shorter stories, “Polaris” was inspired by one of Lovecraft’s dreams. In a letter to a friend, he claimed: “Several nights ago I had a strange dream of a strange city—a city of many palaces and gilded domes, lying in a hollow betwixt ranges of grey, horrible hills.

Crime Fiction (Crime Reads): Before toxicology reports or formal forensic analysis, and in the midst of omnipresent superstition, medieval detectives crack the case with the power of their own original logic. The stakes are always high; those in power kill quickly and with immunity, church law criminalizes autopsy, and individuals deemed “too clever” may find themselves accused of witchcraft.

Mythos (Ethan Sabatella): When Lovecraft was writing his stories, he set them in what was his present day. I think a lot of writers who choose to write Cthulhu Mythos stories, especially newer ones, tend to limit themselves to the 1930, ’20s or earlier to imitate the mood and aesthetics that usually go hand-in-hand with Lovecraftian fiction.

RPG (Grognardia): Whereas the first paragraph used “campaign” as a synonym for a “set of adventures,” the second one talks about “this adventure” in the singular. This makes me wonder if perhaps the author(s) were, either intentionally or unintentionally, conflating the words “adventure(s),” “campaign,” and even “session.”

Fiction (Ruined Chapel): The story is narrated by a dog named Snuff, the familiar of Jack the Ripper. Jack, along with many other figures of classic horror lore, are engaged in something they refer to as “The Game,” which is sort of ritualistic competition spanning the month of October, in years when the moon is full on Halloween.

Review (Pulp Super-Fan): I finally picked up the sixth issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly, the excellent magazine series focused on men’s adventure magazines. This time it has a focus on heists. While I’m not into heists as a genre, I have enjoyed many heist movies over the years.

RPG (Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog): I spent one year and about 30 sessions just exploring the implications of 1:1 time. The entire time my players complained that it was a dumb rule. Then they left my game to start campaigns of their own… which used 1:1 time. And their players did the same. We’d dug hard into “rules as written” at the time. We took a lot of flack for playing D&D differently and saying it was better.

Adventure (Wormwoodiana): Beau Geste by P.C. Wren celebrates its centenary this month. It was to become highly popular, and the book with which he was always identified. The setting is in the period before the First World War and it starts with the meeting of a British civil servant in Nigeria and an officer of French cavalry. The latter has found a mystery of a fort containing only dead legionnaires, propped up against the battlements. Here he also finds a letter from Michael (Beau) Geste confessing to the theft back in England of the Blue Water jewel.

Men’s Mags (Rough Edges): When Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle published the original edition of WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH! TWO-FISTED STORIES FROM MEN’S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES back in 2013, it was the first book reprinting such stories in decades. There were paperback collections of stories from the men’s adventure magazines back in the Fifties and Sixties, but nothing since then as far as I know.

Science Fiction (Sprague de Camp Fan): “A Gun for Dinosaur” was first published in the March 1956 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. The magazine was edited by Horace L. Gold. Decades earlier Gold and de Camp were, more or less, forced into working together on the novel None but Lucifer. John Campbell, the editor of Astounding and Unknown, suggested de Camp do some editing on Gold’s manuscript before he would buy it.

History (Lotus Eaters): Why Are There 3300 Hillforts in Britain?

Robert E. Howard (Black Gate): Here are all of my own Robert E. Howard-related essays here at Black Gate. A couple are pretty good, I think. Mostly in the first two sections below. Check out a couple, please. By Crom!

Horror (Black Gate): This exclamation by Griswell, the protagonist of Robert E Howard’s racially fueled horror tale set among the piney woods of the Louisiana-Arkansas border region, always struck me as a bit of a “take that!” to the old gentleman of Providence, HP Lovecraft. I think Howard was on to something as “Pigeons from Hell,” published posthumously in 1938 is a riveting tale of well-earned revenge, voodoo, and the walking dead.

SFWA (Jon Del Arroz): SFWA Election TRAINWRECK As Sci-fi Writers BAIL On Volunteering.