Blog Archives
sThere has been round of blog posts in the wake of an interview I had at Jared Trueheart’s Legends of Men blog. That interview spurred a response by Jason Ray Carney who disputes that sword and sorcery is man’s fiction. Daniel Davis joined in at his Brain Leakage blog. Jason Ray responded to that. Go […]
One of the stalwarts of the men’s adventure paperback genre from the 1960s through the early 1990s was Lou Cameron. Cameron (1924-2010) started out as an artist. For whatever reason, he turned to writing cranking out dozens of paperbacks in genres including westerns, crime/detective, and war. He won the Western Writers of America Spur Award […]
Someone happened to post the cover to the Ace edition of David C. Smith & Richard L. Tierney’s For the Witch of the Mists (1981). I have seen the book before but never thought about the cover artist. I did not recognize him and did a little searching. The cover artist is Ezra Tucker (b. […]
Gordon R. Dickson (1923-2001) was a mainstay of mass market science fiction paperbacks in the 1970s and 80s. The “Dorsai” series was one of the first in the military science fiction series going back to 1959. Dickson and Poul Anderson could always be counted on supplying adventurous science fiction. Dickson was a pillar for Analog […]
Philip Jose Farmer (1918-2009) is one of those authors that I like a few books of his. He liked to write about fictional characters that inspired him. He wrote more about Tarzan and his world than any other classic character. For years, Time’s Last Gift was on the read one day list. It was also […]
Library book sales can be a wonderful thing. Sometimes, they are a bust. Other times you find a copy of the Gnome Press Conan the Conqueror with dustjacket for $1.00. That happened to me in 1997. This year was better than usual. A new location with more room. Someone appears to have donated their collection […]
Harlan Ellison died this past Thursday, apparently in his sleep, at age 84. I had just read a few weeks earlier that he had a stroke and was not in good health. I first became aware of him as our little library had a book called Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the […]
Howie K. Bentley is one of the rising stars in the sword and sorcery genre. He started out as a guitar player with his band Cauldron Born. Life has included playing in heavy metal bands, teaching guitar, and also writing fiction. He writes dark, violent stories the way sword and sorcery should be written. His […]
There has been a quiet rebirth in the historical novel in the past 15 years– Bernard Cornwell, Simon Scarrow, Ben Kane, Harry Sidebottom etc. Most are Sassenachs (i.e. Englishmen) who have a Roman fixation. I picked up David Gibbins Rome Destroy Carthage at a Dollar General store last week for $3.00 in the paperback rack. […]
Historical adventure took on a new life in the pages of Argosy-All Story Weekly in the late 1920s. It had been a part of both Argosy and All-Story Weekly before the two merged as one publication in 1920. There seemed to be some waning of historical adventure during the 1920s and then an upsurge late […]
A. Merritt (1884-1943) occupied the position that J. R. R. Tolkien now has. From around 1925 through 1955-60, if you asked who was the most popular fantasy writer, A. Merritt would probably be the response. Dwellers in the Mirage was originally serialized in six parts in the pages of Argosy magazine January 23, 1932 to […]
Edmond Hamilton (1904-1977) was the main writer of science fiction for Weird Tales magazine in the late 1920s and 1930s. Or rather I should say, the best science fiction writer for Weird Tales. He was an early writer of space opera alongside J. Schlossel and Edward E. Smith for the pulp magazines. Hamilton did have […]