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sIf you go to Tachyon Publications website, this blurb is at the web page for The Secret History of Fantasy: Fantasy is more than just sword-and-sorcery novels of epic adventures. Here are innovative tales where mythology, fairy tales, and archetypes are re-imagined into a new style of storytelling. This header is present at the Tachyon […]
So you have read a five hundred page anthology of recent, nuanced fantasy and have a need to blow all the sensitivity out of your veins. The antidote is The Big Book of Adventure Stories. This hefty tome came out a few years back from Vintage Crime. Otto Penzler edited the book as part of […]
The Mammoth Book of Warriors and Wizardry
Sunday , 18, January 2015 Black Gate, Book Review, Fiction, Uncategorized 16 CommentsThis is a new anthology in the Mammoth series published by Running Press in the U.S. and Robinson in the U.K. Trade paperback in format, 515 pages, $14.95 price and Sean Wallace is the editor. Twenty-five stories, most on my guess around 10,000 words length on average with a couple that get into novelette territory. […]
When I received my copy of Swords & Dark Magic, I had to laugh at the cover. It struck me as so clichéd with the dainty swordswoman in armor sort of like the Roman lorica segmentata hoisting a very large medieval sword. One can’t have a fantasy painting these days without a female warrior (warrioress?) […]
Sometimes your opinions get challenged. This happened recently when I received the new first issue of Worlds of the Unknown from the revived Spectre Press. This small press magazine contains the second “Elak of Atlantis” story written by Adrian Cole. Henry Kuttner wrote the original four Elak stories for Weird Tales that were published from […]
The Mid-1980s Paperback Sword and Sorcery Extinction Event
Sunday , 28, December 2014 Fiction, Uncategorized 14 CommentsIn the early 1980s, if you were new to the sword and sorcery genre, you could go to your local chain bookstore, generally B. Dalton or Walden Books and get the core library in short order. Robert E. Howard’s Conan, Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Michael Moorcock’s Elric were all there. There was […]