Blog Archives
sI love heavily illustrated books about fictional genres and publishing– Geoffrey O’Brien’s Hardboiled America, Lee Server’s Danger is My Business, Randy Broecker’s Fantasy of the 20th Century being some examples. A new addition is Grady Henrdrix’s Paperbacks from Hell (“The Twisted History of ‘70s and ‘80s Horror Fiction). This book had some buzz last year […]
Mary Shelley gets a lot of credit these days. It’s been increasingly said that her seminal work Frankenstein birthed the science fiction genre. I personally find the arguments unconvincing, as do some of my esteemed colleagues. Make no mistake – Frankenstein was a great tale, and I certainly enjoyed my read-through of it last year. But […]
The spooky season is upon us once again, and as HP shares his experience with the horror stories of Robert E Howard, I’ve decided to get Gothic. This month is Poctober for me, as I spend some time with a master who inspired Howard, Lovecraft, and many other great succeeding SFF writers. Before now I’d […]
Independent authors would do well to take a page from Darkest of Dreams, a collection of short stories written by four different authors. The prospect of writing a 100,000 word novel, which provides around 300 pages of entertainment, requires a serious time commitment. To say nothing of the costs associated with investing in editing, proofreading, and […]
Conan meets Cthulhu
Saturday , 18, March 2017 Appendix N, Authors, Before the Big Three, Short Fiction 23 CommentsIn Jeffro’s last Sensor Sweep he made note of the Alexandru Costantin’s recent blog post, which puts forth a rather bold claim – that Robert E. Howard did Lovecraftian horror better than H.P. himself. For those who may be unaware, Howard was one of the major contributors to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. In other words, he wrote stories […]
I am far from the first person to note that role-playing games, especially fantasy RPGs, do not bear a strong resemblance to the literary sources most often referred to, Epic Fantasy. While fantasy games may be filled with dwarves, orcs, elves, and goblins during play the characters do not act as if they were on […]