Search Results for: Astounding

G.W. Thomas on Science Fiction of the 30s by Damon Knight

Comments 7 comments

Conan the Barbarian: Archie Style! From Everything Archie #111 (May 1984). Art by Stan Goldberg and Larry Lapick. G.W. Thomas has gradually become my favorite genre blogger. Not just because of his constant stream of content — he posts every two days at Dark Worlds Quarterly, and has been doing so for nearly a decade — but because of his endlessly zany topics. In the past few months he’s covered Haunted Houses in 50s comics, the Top Ten Ghostbreakers from…

Read More Read More

Galactic War, Haunted Farmhouses, and an Occupied Earth: September-October Print Magazines

Comments 3 comments

September-October 2024 issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction & Fact, and the Summer issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Cover art by Shutterstock, NASA, and Mondolithic Studios The big news this month is the arrival of the new issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, after a nearly 8-month hiatus. In the pages of the new issue, publisher Gordon van Gelder reports that “Ongoing production problems have led us to skip the Spring issue…

Read More Read More

A to Z Review: “Basic Agreement,” by Avis Pabel

Comments 3 comments

“Basic Agreement,”  by Avis Pabel appeared in the September 1958 issue of Astounding and was reprinted in the December UK issue of  the magazine. It is the only story by Pabel that appears in the Internet Science Fiction Database, although she wrote articles under the name Avis Brick that appeared in the magazine Persuasion, which was published by the Nathaniel Branden Institute, part of the Objectivist movement championing Ayn Rand. “Basic Agreement” is an odd little story of Marjorie, who…

Read More Read More

Cinema of Swords: Swords in the Arthouse

Comments 3 comments

Historical adventure and fantasy films tend to be straightforward genre pictures long on plot and action and short on deep themes and introspection, which is okay, you can’t have everything. Or can you? Some ambitious filmmakers want it all, and are willing to risk losing an audience who expects simple action and adventure by giving them ideas to think about or visuals that are striking but hard to parse. Films with such vaulting ambitions often fall into the category of…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: The Doom That Came to Sarnath by H.P. Lovecraft

Comments 23 comments

The Doom That Came to Sarnath (Ballantine Books, November 1976). Cover by Murray Tinkelman H.P. Lovecraft, creator of the Cthulhu Mythos, was one of the greatest horror writers of the 20th Century. But horror wasn’t all he produced, as editor Lin Carter adroitly pointed out in the introduction to The Doom That Came to Sarnath. Those readers who know only the Cthulhu Mythos stories, know only a single side of Lovecraft… the Cthulhu Mythos, while completely his own invention, was…

Read More Read More

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: Two-Thirds of a Miracle

Comments 7 comments

The Fellowship of the Ring (New Line Cinema, December 2001) Some of us waited a very long time for these movies — or at least, that’s how it felt. I grew up in the 1960s reading science fiction and fantasy; my father had read pulps like Weird Tales back in the ‘30s, and when those stories were republished as postwar paperbacks, he bought them and then passed them on to me. But I discovered Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: Collecting Myself: The Uncollected Stories of Barry N. Malzberg, edited by Robert Friedman and Gregory Shepard

Comments 2 comments

Collecting Myself: The Uncollected Stories of Barry N. Malzberg (Stark House, March 8, 2024). Cover by Jeff Jordan Barry N. Malzberg has had an enormously prolific career. He published his first science fiction story the August 1967 issue of Galaxy magazine, and over the next six decades has produced an astounding 500+ short stories, dozens of novels, eleven anthologies, and nearly two dozen collections. These days he’s well known as a genre historian and critic. That’s him on the back…

Read More Read More

Make Room For Harry Harrison: Anthony Aycock on a Forgotten SF Master

Comments 17 comments

Make Room! Make Room! (Berkley Medallion, July 1967). Cover by Richard Powers Harry Harrison was a true believer. Like Isaac Asimov, Terry Carr, Donald Wollheim, Gardner Dozois, Lin Carter, Damon Knight and a handful of others, he dedicated his life to science fiction, and in a multitude of roles, as writer, editor, critic, and scholar. His fiction, however, has been largely — and unjustly — forgotten, and in the dozen years since his death in August 2012, all his books…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: The Last Man on Earth edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh

Comments 7 comments

The Last Man on Earth (Fawcett Crest / Ballantine, August 1982). Cover by Wayne Barlowe I continue to dip into the (seemingly endless) supply of anthologies from the three amigos of science fiction, Isaac Asimov, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh. I’m not sure how many they actually produced together, but I’ve managed to track down around 80. They began collaborating in the 80s, and averaged over half a dozen books a year, until Asimov’s death in 1992. This time…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury

Comments 7 comments

Courtship Rite (Timescape/Pocket Books, September 1983). Cover by Rowena Morrill I still remember the buzz of excitement in Ottawa fandom when a young local writer named Charles de Lint sold his first novel to Ace Books. Riddle of the Wren wasn’t particularly groundbreaking —  not like the breakout books soon to come from Charles — but everyone read it, and it was passed around and enjoyed with the kind of hometown pride that quickly catapulted Charles into literary stardom, at…

Read More Read More