Blog Archives
sSword & sorcery as a fictional genre had its origin in the weird fiction pulp magazines of the late 1920s into the 1930s. There was a forgotten variation in Planet Stories in the 1940s. Then it disappeared from the magazines for the most part in the 1950s. There was a renascence in the digest magazines […]
Sensor Sweep: Lin Carter Children’s Fantasy, SPI, Kaluta, and Blood of Elves
Monday , 11, December 2017 Sensor Sweep 10 CommentsFiction (Tolkien and Fantasy): “Fantasiae was, according to its initial subtitle, the “monthly newsletter of the Fantasy Association,” based out of Los Angeles. The first issue was dated April 1973, and the final issue was no. 103 (volume 9 no. 10) from October 1981. The editor for the entire run was Ian M. Slater, who also […]
Sensor Sweep: Dungeon Dwellers, Shambleau, Dumb Barbarians
Monday , 4, December 2017 Sensor Sweep 6 CommentsRPG (Blackgate.com): I’m still unpacking the boxes I brought home from the Fall 2017 Games Plus auction. There’s so many SF and fantasy board games being published these days that it’s impossible to keep up. But you know, I do my best. A week after the auction, I dropped by Games Plus in Mount Prospect […]
Sensor Sweep: Lin Carter, Tolkien, and Modiphius Conan
Monday , 27, November 2017 Sensor Sweep 8 CommentsFiction (Tolkien and Fantasy blog): “The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, which published some 70-odd books from 1969-1974, is justly renowned, and Lin Carter (1930-1988) is often acclaimed as the editor of the series, but he was not the editor. Look at the footer of every single one of his introductions to books in the series: […]
This is a piece that I wrote 12 years ago for a collection of essays on Lin Carter with the horrible title of Apostle of Letters. Maybe 30 copies of the book were sold. There were some good essays in the book and some not so good essays. Anyway, I make the case there was […]
I had mentioned two years back about the idea of an anthology of orphan sword and sorcery characters– Jirel of Joiry, Elak of Atlantis, Rald of Forthe, Prester John, Kothar etc. We have seen some characters continued by other hands, Adrian Cole has written two Elak of Atlantis stories and now we have a full-fledged […]