Search Results for: Jeff Noon

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Damon Sasser on 2015 Howard Days

Comments 3 comments

I’m not sure there’s quite anything like Howard Days, held each summer in Cross, Plains, TX. It’s a weekend celebration of all things Robert E. Howard and it’s helped to keep Howard’s legacy alive. Though I lived in Austin, TX for a few years, I never made it to Howard Days. So, I turned to the best fan journal (newsletter/fanzine…) I’ve ever come across, REH: Two-Gun Racounteur. And founder Damon Sasser (2014’s Featured Guest) was kind enough to write a post about…

Read More Read More

Blogging from the Nebulas Weekend

Comments 1 comment

I’m in Chicago, at the 50th Annual Nebula Awards Weekend, and so far, it’s all pretty amazing. For those who don’t know, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America hold an annual Nebula Awards weekend that feels kind of like a very small fan con, except most of the attendees are SFWA members and networking and casual business discussion dominates. My first Nebulas Weekend was in San José two years ago. Chicago is pretty impressive and the hotel, the…

Read More Read More

The Woman Who Was a Man Who Was a Woman: Alice Sheldon and James Tiptree Jr.

Comments 3 comments

Alice Hastings Bradley Davey Sheldon was a remarkable person — world traveler, painter, sportswoman, CIA analyst, PhD in experimental psychology… and one of the greatest of all science fiction writers. If you don’t recognize her name, that’s partly by her own design. Born in 1915, from an early age Alice was a lover of this new genre that was in those days still called “scientifiction,” devouring every copy of Weird Tales, Wonder Stories, and Amazing Stories that she could find,…

Read More Read More

How It All Began

Comments 1 comment

I discovered D&D when I was 12 years old. Typical, but that’s where typical ended. No friend/sibling/ cousin/teacher sat me down at a table with those early paperback rulebooks and oddly shaped dice. I didn’t get to see the rules or the dice. Come to think of it, there wasn’t a table. I’d moved the year before, and a distant friend was visiting. Our families spent an afternoon together roaming a museum, and he and I were alone for part…

Read More Read More

Tales From Windy City Pulp and Paper

Comments 13 comments

This coming weekend, Friday April 25th through Sunday April 27th, is Doug Ellis’s magnificent celebration of all things pulp, the Windy City Pulp and Paperback Convention here in Chicago, in nearby Lombard, Illinois. Windy City is one of my favorite local cons. I’ve written about it before, and in fact I’ve been attending the show for around 10 years. 2012 was perhaps the most successful show in some years, considering I returned with a fabulous assortment of mint-condition fantasy and science fiction paperbacks from the collection of…

Read More Read More

Delve Into a 3-Part Supermodule With Cormyr: The Tearing of the Weave

Comments 4 comments

I’m still digging into the fabulous Forgotten Realms products I won at the Spring Games Plus Auction, all of which were brand new and criminally cheap – probably because they were written for D&D version 3.5 and are now a little out of date. Not that that bothers me; I mostly play version 1.0 anyway. I’ve been very impressed with what I’ve sampled so far, including Lost Empires of Faerûn and Underdark, both of which were top-notch. They proved easily adaptable to…

Read More Read More

Five Vampires

Comments 3 comments

I suspect it’s not uncommon for a person to look back on the era of his earliest days and deem it the “perfect” time to have been a child; I certainly do. I regularly tell my own children how grateful I am to have been a kid in the 1970s. I say this not out of any particular love of plaid, shag carpet, or disco, but for two rather different reasons. Firstly, ’70s were obsessed with the weird, the occult,…

Read More Read More

The Cleric and the Crucifix

Comments 2 comments

“Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!” There was something diabolically sweet in her tones — something of the tingling of glass when struck — which rang through the brains even of us who heard the words addressed to another. As for Arthur, he seemed under a spell; moving his hands from his face, he opened wide his arms. She…

Read More Read More

Weird Tales Pulls Novel Excerpt Following Fan Uproar

Comments 40 comments

It’s been an interesting day for Weird Tales, the oldest genre magazine on the market. It began with the abrupt resignation of Ann VanderMeer as a senior contributing editor, “due to major artistic and philosophical differences with the existing editors.” As reported here last year, VanderMeer was replaced as editor by Marvin Kaye as the magazine transitioned to new Publisher Nth Dimension Media, run by John Harlacher. While Ann commented that her resignation “has been in the works for several…

Read More Read More

How I Met Your Cimmerian (and other Barbarian Swordsmen)

Comments 10 comments

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…

Read More Read More