Well, sort of. I’ve been waiting expectantly for this one. It’s something of a watershed issue — Ann VanderMeer’s final issue as editor, and the first from the new publishers, Nth Dimension media (as we reported back in August). It has fiction from Stephen Graham Jones, Tamsyn Muir, Evan J. Peterson, and many others, and articles from Paula Guran, Michael Skeet and Kenneth Hite. At least, so they tell me. I haven’t been able to find a copy. I blame…
There is a line from the band ELO‘s song Ticket to the Moon, on their concept album Time, that says, Remember the good old 1980s, when things were so uncomplicated, I wish I could go back there again, and everything could be the same… I can’t listen to that album [and yes, I listen to ELO often, sue me] without having those words haunt me. You see, the 1980s were ‘my’ time. We all have this period, the decade from…
I was born in 1971, which makes me old, but not too old, at least in my mind. Although I was indeed a living creature on this planet during the bulk of the 1970s I didn’t really have much conscious thought that was dedicated to anything resembling fiction. Sure, I saw Star Wars at the local cinema, I had the action figures, but that was about as close to anything literary as I got, the bulk of my time sucked…
by Ryan Harvey All rights reserved. Copyright 2006 by New Epoch Press. When Robert E. Howard discovered the character Conan in 1932, his writing took on a feverish intensity as the barbarian warrior turned into a literary obsession that allowed his creator’s natural skills and inclinations as a writer to bloom. Likewise in 1932, when Clark Ashton Smith discovered the last continent of dying Zothique, he knew that he had found the ideal setting for his poetic and dark imagination…
The Curse (Trans World Entertainment, September 11, 1987) and In the Tall Grass (Netflix, October 4, 2019) Yes, a new watch-a-thon, featuring me, a hopeless procrastinator, plumbing the depths of cinematic misery for your entertainment. This time around, I will be watching Lovecraftian and Lovecraftian-adjacent films, and as usual they must be films I’ve never seen before (which makes the task trickier and bound for disaster). If you don’t know anything about Lovecraft’s writings, cosmic horror, the Mythos, or Cthulhu,…
The New Atlantis was originally published in The New Atlantis and Other Novellas of Science Fiction, edited by Robert Silverberg and published by Hawthorn Books in May, 1975. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award and won the Locus poll. The story opens with Le Guin’s narrator, Belle, returning home from a Wilderness Week aboard a bus where another passenger attempts to engage her in conversation, noting that a new continent is rising in the ocean,…
Not only is the Dray Prescot series the longest running Sword & Planet series ever published in English, but it’s also consistently of a high quality. There are quite a few volumes that — for me—rival any of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom books. Certainly, these two series are my all-time favorites, and together make up the primary influence on my own Sword & Planet series, the five books of the Talera series by Charles Allen Gramlich (Gotta get those “three”…
Quite a few writers who went on to bigger names in other genres wrote some of their earliest books in Sword & Planet. Michael Moorcock was one of these. He’s mostly known for his Elric series. Elric is a kind of anti-Conan. But in 1964, at around the age of 25, he wrote three Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiches set on Mars. In the introduction to a later release of these books he mentioned his early infatuation with ERB, and that…
Yes, a new watch-a-thon, featuring me, a hopeless procrastinator, plumbing the depths of cinematic misery for your entertainment. This time around, I will be watching Lovecraftian and Lovecraftian-tangential films, and as usual they must be films I’ve never seen before (which makes the task trickier and bound for disaster). If you don’t know anything about Lovecraft’s writings, cosmic horror, the Mythos, or Cthulhu, that’s great — keep it that way. Onwards! H.P. Lovecraft’s The Old Ones (2024) – Tubi Three…
Read Part I of this series, Don Wollheim, Edwin L. Arnold, and Otis Adelbert Kline. The most controversial of the second generation of Sword & Planet authors was certainly John Norman, which is the pseudonym for author John Lange, a philosophy professor. The first book, Tarnsman of Gor, was published in 1966 and then generally one a year until a break after 1988. There are a total of 37 books at last count but I’ve only personally read up to…