Search Results for: tale covers

Vintage Empires: James Nicoll on Galactic Empires, Volumes One & Two, edited by Brian W. Aldiss

Comments 2 comments

My fellow Canadian James Nicoll continues to be one of my favorite SF bloggers, probably because he covers stuff I’m keenly interested in. Meaning exciting new authors, mixed with a reliable diet of vintage classics. In the last two weeks he’s discussed Kate Elliots’s The Witch Roads, Axie Oh’s The Floating World, Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance, and Emily Yu-Xuan Qin’s Aunt Tigress, all from 2025; as well as Walter Jon Williams The Crown Jewels (from 1987), Wilson Tucker’s The…

Read More Read More

The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part I: Don Wollheim, Edwin L. Arnold, and Otis Adelbert Kline

Comments 6 comments

Swordsmen in the Sky (Ace, 1964). Cover by Frank Frazetta Swordsmen in the Sky, edited by Donald Wollheim If our genre has a holy grail to find, this would be it. I read this collection as a kid. Found it in our local library. And loved every single story in there. Took me a while to find a copy as an adult but it’s one of my pride and joys.

Mechanical Trees and Mini-Woolly Mammoths: May-June Print Science Fiction Magazines

Comments 8 comments

May-June 2025 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Cover art by Tithi Luadthong/Shutterstock, and IG Digital Arts & Annie Spratt Back in February I was surprised to learn that the last surviving print science fiction magazines, Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, had all been sold to Must Read Books, a new publisher backed by a small group of genre fiction fans. I was very sad to see Analog…

Read More Read More

By Crom: Marvel, Roy Thomas, and The Barbarian Life

Comments 4 comments

So, back in January of 2022, I did a post on Roy Thomas and the Marvel Conan comic he created in the seventies. I never read that comic. But for some reason in 2019, I decided to buy the first of what turned out to be his three memoirs about the series (mostly about the first 115 issues, which constituted his first run with Conan), and also one of the Marvel Omnibuses that had been put out recently. I ended…

Read More Read More

Interviewing the Champion of Heroes, Jason M Waltz of Rogue Blades Entertainment and Foundation

Comments 8 comments

Jason M. Waltz has published 16 Books under Rogue Blades Entertainment (RBE), another 3 under Rogue Blades Foundation (RBF), having lured in authors Such as Brandon Sanderson, Orson Scott Card, C.L. Werner, Glen Cook, Steven Erikson, Ian C. Esslemont, William King, Andy Offutt, and spurred the writing careers of dozens. Not all are Sword and Sorcery (S&S), with weird western and pirate anthologies appearing, but most are.  Two of my favorite introductions to anthologies cap the ends of the RBE…

Read More Read More

Writ in Water: V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

Comments 1 comment

How many times have you heard (or even repeated) the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for?” Of course it’s a cliché, a commonplace beloved of parents and primary school teachers the world over, but such chestnuts sometimes actually contain the distilled wisdom of the human race, and you ignore them at your peril, as is demonstrated (or not, maybe) in Victoria Elizabeth Schwab’s 2020 dark fantasy, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. It’s a spirited, stimulating read that gives…

Read More Read More

Houses of Ill Repute: Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix and Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

Comments 0 Comment

  Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix (Berkley, January 14, 2025) andStarling House by Alix E. Harrow (Tor Books, October 3, 2023). Covers: uncredited, Micaela Alcaino No, not that kind of house of ill repute (though I confess I thought the semi-salacious implication of the headline might get some of you to read a bit further, though of course not you who are reading this now, just all those others). Rather the gothic trope of the creepy house, the…

Read More Read More

A Challenge Worth Smiling About: Tim Waggoner on Writing Conan

Comments 2 comments

Tim Waggoner, and his upcoming novel Conan: Spawn of the Serpent God (Titan Books, October 28, 2025) On a non-descript day I am intercepted on entering a coffee shop. It turns out to be a happy accident, an old colleague, eager to join me as I wait for my next interview to begin. The distraction is welcome but doesn’t help much. My interviewee isn’t late but they aren’t early either and I’m beginning to get nervous. “You’re waiting for him,…

Read More Read More

Tubi Dive, Part V

Comments 2 comments

Meatball Machine and Meatball Machine Kodoku (TLA Releasing, 2005 and 2017) 50 films that I dug up on Tubi. Enjoy! Meatball Machine (2005) and Meatball Machine Kodoku (2017) It’s a double-header in more ways than one, as I settled down to watch a couple of films that bookend a period known to cinephiles as Gonzo Japanese Splatter. Between these films, we were served up classics such as Tokyo Gore Police, Machine Girl, and the afore-reviewed Toilet of the Dead and…

Read More Read More

Tor Doubles #5: Poul Anderson’s No Truce with Kings and Fritz Leiber’s Ship of Shadows

Comments 4 comments

  Both Poul Anderson’s No Truce for Kings and Fritz Leiber’s Ship of Shadows originally appeared in issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Not only did their initial publication occur in the same periodical, but both of those original issues sported covers painted by Ed Emshwiller. No Truce for Kings was originally published in F&SF in June, 1963. It won the Hugo Award and received a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 2010. No Truce for Kings…

Read More Read More