Crafting Sword & Planet: Swords of Talera and Other Tales by Charles Gramlich

Crafting Sword & Planet: Swords of Talera and Other Tales by Charles Gramlich

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Strange Worlds, edited by Jeff Doten, containing the Sword & Planet tale “God’s Dream” by Charles Gramlich (CreateSpace, September 26, 2011). Cover by Jeff Doten

In 1998, my first novel Swords of Talera ran as a four-part serial in Startling Science Stories. It won the “Reader’s Choice” award for each issue it appeared in. The pleasure of having the book first published that way was sweet — the same way that Edgar Rice Burroughs, Otis Adelbert Kline, and Robert E. Howard had much of their stuff published.

After I’d finished Swords of Talera in 1983, I’d started a sequel called Wings over Talera but only wrote the first two chapters. My grad school work was intensifying and it seemed silly to write a second book in a series when the first book hadn’t even been submitted to any publishers. After Swords sold, though, I immediately set to work on the sequel. It was published as a four-part serial in Alien Worlds: Beyond Space and Time, a sister mag to Startling Science Stories.

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The Lure of the Basilisk – 80’s Fantasy with a Cool Cover

The Lure of the Basilisk – 80’s Fantasy with a Cool Cover

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Dus_BasiliskI was recently talking online about how in the eighties and nineties we bought fantasy books because we liked the cover. And the pic I included was The Lure of the Basilisk, which kicked off the adventures of Garth the Overman. It’s been ten years since I wrote about that, back in the days of The Public life of Sherlock Holmes. So here’s a revisit of to a pretty cool fantasy series that you should check out, if you never have. 

The eighties was full of epic fantasy series’ by the likes of David Eddings, Raymond Feist, Stephen R. Donaldson, Terry Brooks and Katherine Kurtz, to name a few. While many remain giants in the history of the genre, Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote a largely forgotten series: The Lords of Dus.

Watt-Evans has written quite a bit of fantasy, science fiction and horror and is probably best known for his Ethshar series. Ethshar was created as a role-playing game world and he ended up writing many novels and short stories using the setting. The Misenchanted Sword is my favorite Ethshar novel.

Watt-Evans had flunked out of Princeton’s architectural school and had to wait a year before he could re-apply. He had heard (the possibly apocryphal story) that Larry Niven started his career by deciding to write for one year and if he sold something, continue on: if he didn’t, he’d give it up. Watt-Evans decided to do the same and wrote a slew of short stories, selling one.

He did go back to school, but he wrote a novel (The Cyborg and the Sorcerer) on a summer break and after two years of college, gave it up to make a living with the typewriter (as a writer, not a typewriter salesman).

Influenced by Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock and Lin Carter’s anthologies (Flashing Swords, anyone?), he was ready to spin a fantasy saga featuring a non-human (but less effete than a Melnibonian) hero. Thus, the race of overmen.

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AI Could Not Write These Stories

AI Could Not Write These Stories

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Uncanny Magazine, issues 63 & 64, March/April and
May/June 2025. Covers by Galen Dara and Grace P. Fong

With every issue, Uncanny Magazine brings you stories, poems, essays, interviews, and podcasts, all made by actual people! Now more than ever, it is important to support creators who are working to make the art you love. Check out our Uncanny Magazine Year 12: Fly Forever, Space Unicorns! Kickstarter for subscriptions and cool backer rewards, and help us spread the word!

Science fiction has long been enamored with artificial intelligence. As far back as Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon, writers have speculated on how machines might develop consciousness and what the world might look like if they did. In modern fiction, we see a vast range of possibilities — stories where robots fall in love, stories where AI can determine anyone’s true cause of death, stories of experimental prototypes reading Western literature as dystopia looms, stories where simulations let us talk to our loved ones after they’ve passed. In R.S.A Garcia’s “Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200” artificial intelligence comes in the form of a loyal farmhand companion, made of nanites, repeatedly eaten by a goat.

In the time since Erewhon was written, we’ve made a lot of technological advances. There are medical diagnostic algorithms, programs that generate images in various styles, and increasingly sophisticated chatbots. As Martha Wells pointed out in her recent interview in Scientific American, humans love to anthropomorphize, and fictional depictions of advanced artificial intelligences often reinforce that tendency. But in reality we are nowhere near the level of sentient, intelligent machines.

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Galaxy Science Fiction, March 1955: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, March 1955: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy, March 1955. Cover by Mel Hunter

It’s time for another exciting Galaxy Science Fiction review!  The March, 1955 issue contains stories by some of Galaxy’s best authors — Simak, Pohl, and Sturgeon.  I know I’ve been away for a while, so let’s dive in.

The cover, “Hold Still, Dammit!” is by Mel Hunter.  Hunter was very interested in aviation and also worked as a technical illustrator at Northrop Aircraft.

“Project Mastodon” by Clifford D. Simak — Three men work together to create a time machine and go about 150,000 years into the past.  They set up a camp and plan to establish their own land they could lease out to tourists or movie producers — if they can be recognized as a sovereign nation.  They account for differences in terrain by using a helicopter that contains the time machine. But when a raging mastodon charges into their camp, their helicopter is destroyed, leaving them stranded in the past unless they can figure out a way to account for the terrain differences in the future so they don’t emerge in mid-air or buried underground.

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Tor Double #16: James Tiptree Jr.’s The Color of Neanderthal Eyes and Michael Bishop’s And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees

Tor Double #16: James Tiptree Jr.’s The Color of Neanderthal Eyes and Michael Bishop’s And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees

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Cover for The Color of Neanderthal Eyes by Dave Archer
Cover for And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees by Brian Waugh

And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees was originally published as a stand-alone novel by Harper & Row in March, 1976. The story lends takes its title from the poem “You, Andrew Marvell,” written by Archibald MacLeish, which also provided the title for Black Gate contributor Rich Horton’s blog. The poem is a look at the transience of empires, and Michael Bishop’s story follows suit.

In fact, published in the month following Vance’s The Last Castle and Silverberg’s Nightwings, And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees almost gives the feeling that the Tor Double series was a collection of stories about the collapse of civilization. In And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees, Michael Bishop describes and alien world which was settled by humans fleeing Earth six millennia before. By the time of the novella, they have split into warring factions and outright battle appears to be just over the horizon.

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The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part VI: Charles Nuetzel

The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part VI: Charles Nuetzel

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Warriors of Noomas (Powell, May 1969). Cover by Albert Nuetzel

Back when the internet was young and I was in a group called REHupa, The Robert E. Howard United Press Association, I heard about Charles Nuetzel, who’d written some Howard-like and Burroughs-like tales.

I’d stumbled on his book called Warriors of Noomas. After a search on the net, I found an email address and sent one flying into the void. I wasn’t sure he was even alive, but he answered and we became frequent correspondents and friends. He too was a huge fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs and quite a bit of his writing was ERB inspired. He’d become a pulp writer and book packager for Powell Publications.

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Don’t Leave Earth Without It: Bill Warren’s Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties

Don’t Leave Earth Without It: Bill Warren’s Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties

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The 21st Century Edition

It’s getting hard to remember in this time of home streaming, but in the glory days of Hollywood, the great studios (each of which had a recognizable house style and its own particular areas of cinematic expertise) poured forth a seemingly endless river of movies in every genre you could think of, many of which have seeped so far into our subconscious as to become permanent parts of our collective culture.

Merely to name these studios and genres is to instantly summon iconic images; the MGM musical — Gene Kelly swinging around a streetlamp in the pouring rain, Astaire and Charisse dancing in the dark across a stylized Manhattan park; the John Ford western — John Wayne closing the door on hearth and home to walk alone into the desolate beauty of Monument Valley; the Warner Brothers Gangster picture — Cagney and Robinson and Bogart sneering, snarling, shooting, dying; the Universal monster movie — Karloff and Lugosi slowly stalking their victims, as implacable, as inevitable as death itself; the film noir — darkened big-city streets slick with mist and moral ambiguity; the women’s picture — Davis and Crawford and Stanwyck, selflessly sacrificing themselves for husbands and children unworthy of them, their faces glowing with the glory and agony of unrequited motherhood; the screwball comedy — Claudette Colbert bringing a car to a screeching halt by pulling up her skirt and showing some leg…

There’s something missing from this list, though, isn’t there? You bet there is, and few genres are as rich in indelible moments and images as the science fiction films of the 1950’s.

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A Date With Superman

A Date With Superman

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Good afterevenmorn, Readers! And also watchers, this case.

It’s been a bit of a rough time for me of late and so, deciding that staying home and moping was not going to help me at all, I took myself out on a date. I went to the movies to watch the newest Superman. I loved the movie, but I’m not here to provide an in-depth review, rather, I’d like to reflect on the core of the character of James Gunn’s Superman and how it was, surprisingly, precisely what my heart needed in this moment.

Let me go pour myself a whiskey and settle in.

Okay. I’m good. Let’s go.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Western Noir: Anson Mount & Hell on Wheels

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Western Noir: Anson Mount & Hell on Wheels

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.”

– Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.

Hard to believe it’s been almost fifteen years since AMC debuted a gritty new western, Hell on Wheels. In November of 2011, Justified had completed two seasons, and suddenly I had two favorite shows. Back then television shows aired weekly, not in multiple episode ‘drops.’ and they weren’t available on-demand. You watched them when they aired or recorded them on your DVR. I would actually sit and watch both those shows every week, ‘live.’

MILD SPOILERS

I’m not gonna blatantly drop stuff, but don’t get mad if you can infer something from this post. The show’s been out there for fifteen years. Go watch it!

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Post Oaks and Sand Roughs: A first trek to Howard Days

Post Oaks and Sand Roughs: A first trek to Howard Days

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The Howard Home in Cross Plains, Texas, home of Howard Days 2025

I’m two hours out from Cross Plains, Texas, and my thoughts are, much like the proceeding 20 hours, ruminating over the pair of fantasy authors named Howard that died far too young that led me on this trek.

I’m on my way to Howard Days 2025, the two-day celebration of the life and work of the godfather of sword-and-sorcery himself, Robert E. Howard. It’s been mecca for his fans and successors for almost four decades, and every sword-and-sorcery devotee I know hopes to make pilgrimage at least once.

The other is Howard Andrew Jones, who passed away from cancer this past January, and whose absence still festers like an open wound. Recently, it’s because we’d made plans to both attend our first Howard Days last year, and I’d had to pull out at the last moment. He’s described it as a spiritual experience, and I promised to meet him back this year at Howard Days this year. I don’t give oaths to lightly, or break promises to friends.

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