Search Results for: New Edge Sword

New Treasures: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Seven, edited by Jonathan Strahan

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I always look forward to the Best of the Year anthologies. It’s an annual ritual, like the arrival of spring, heralding new hope and rebirth for the land. Or something. Over the next few months, we’ll see several of them, from Rich Horton, David Hartwell, Gardner Dozois, Stephen Jones, and Paula Guran, just to name a few. But the season kicks off every year with Jonathan Strahan’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, certainly one of the most interesting…

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The Next Generation comes to New Pulp

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Attending Windy City Pulp and Paper Con in Chicago reinforced the fact that the burgeoning New Pulp world is quickly becoming as diverse as the classic originals. While most people tend to stereotype pulp as falling between sword & sorcery, hardboiled detective fiction, and costumed avengers, it was really far more broad in its appeal, encompassing everything from sci-fi to swashbucklers to boxing tales to romance to humor. A few months ago, I spotlighted Pro Se Presents for doing an…

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Vintage Bits: Sword of Aragon

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I’m a huge fan of computer games, and especially role playing games. Perhaps the thing I enjoy most about them is they’re so clearly descended from the hobby I loved as a teen — desktop role playing and Dungeons and Dragons, itself a direct descendent of Sword & Sorcery as written by Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, Roger Zelazny, and Fritz Leiber. The things I cherished as a young man have grown up and conquered Western Civilization. The only thing…

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New Treasures: Gygax Magazine, Issue #1

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I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the hottest thing in role playing at the moment  is the rise of OSR. The Old School Renaissance has captured the interest of thousands of players — many returning to gaming for the first time in decades — and fostered the birth of a fresh generation of dynamic new companies. We’ve featured some of the best products here on the BG blog, including Carcosa, Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea, Dungeon…

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Wake Up to a New World With Awakening: The Art of Halo 4

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I took the family to Best Buy yesterday to buy a new phone for my wife. They didn’t have anything below $250, so we trooped back to the car to return to the Verizon store. My teenage boys, flush with dog-sitting money, were the only happy shoppers, chortling excitedly in the back seat over a copy of 343 Industries’ Halo 4. I got some scattered details over breakfast this morning. Master Chief, hot-babe AI Cortana, abruptly awakened from deep sleep, a Covenant…

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 8: Swords of Mars

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“But my memories of that great tragedy are not all sad. There was high adventure, there was noble fighting; and in the end there was — but perhaps you would like to hear about it.” Guess who’s back? John Carter, who for the twenty years of real time since The Warlord of Mars has only served the role of a cameo character, is once again the hero and narrator of a Martian novel. And for the first time, he goes…

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Robert E. Howard: The Sword Collector’s Sword Collection

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When I wrote “Robert E. Howard: The Sword Collector and His Poetry” in August 2010, it was to highlight REH’s interest in swords. The article listed each type of sword mentioned in his poems along with a definition, a photo and a snippet showing REH’s usage of it in verse. At that time, the photograph at right was not available. In fact, it is one of three that were discovered earlier this year by Howard scholar Patrice Louinet, showing Robert…

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How I Met Your Cimmerian (and other Barbarian Swordsmen)

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It was the summer of 1969. Very much like the one described in the song by Bryan Adams. I quit the rock and roll band I’d been playing with since high school, went to work with my Dad, and had just finished reading The Lord of the Rings; a year earlier, while still in high school, I’d read The Hobbit. Now, after completing my magical journey through Middle-earth, I was totally hooked. I had found a liking — no, a…

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New Pulp Fiction for Our New Hard Times

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Pulp fiction is back — in print, online, in ebooks, and on iPads. Tough guys, tough women, tough prose, action and more action, blood and thunder, heroes and villains presented unapologetically as heroes and villains. And why not? Why not have as much blood and thunder as we can handle right now, given that the last time we saw this much imaginative raw prose in the hands of readers, we were in the hard times of the early 1930s? Fans…

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Art of the Genre: Top 10 Fantasy Swords

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One of the things I’ve always enjoyed in the realm of fantasy has been the sword. There’s just something so pure about a good blade at your side, and if that weapon is somehow touched with magic or fate then all the better. Something so ancient and primal is attached to a sword, and even when the world has outdated their use they still find their way into science fiction just because of the nostalgic power they evoke. Space pirates…

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