Search Results for: New Edge Sword

“The Distances Between Things”: Patricia A. McKillip’s The Changeling Sea

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I’ve written a few times about my ongoing fascination with fantasy from the 1980s. That fascination led me to pick up a used copy of The Changeling Sea, a short 1988 novel by Patricia A. McKillip. McKillip isn’t specifically a 1980s writer — her first novel, The House on Parchment Street, was published in 1973, and she’s produced work steadily ever since; her last novel, The Bards of Bone Plain, came out in 2010 and a collection of short stories,…

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Five Geeky Gaming Christmas Present Ideas

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It’s that time of year again and our house is filling up with Amazon boxes. Kurtzhau, our eldest, has hit 11 and finally passed from that awkward age of grown-up interests but explored through toys — mostly Halo Megabloks — to the open-ended gamer phase. This makes him suddenly easy to buy for and relieved relatives have responded with generosity. Mostly this has meant Warhammer and Firestorm Armada sets. However, there are also modern board and card games on his and our…

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The Classic Games of Metagaming: Ogre

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Last week, I wrote about discovering early Metagaming advertisements in copies of Analog and Asimov’s SF, as well as other science fiction magazines I read in the late 1970s. The ads — for tiny science fiction games I could carry around in my pocket — fired my imagination. I was already gaming with my friends over lunch at school and the thought of playing games featuring giant robot tanks and wizard duels instead of another round of chess was too much to…

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The Roots of Microgaming: The Classic Games of Metagaming

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I’ve been writing a lot about board gaming recently. It’s been a big part of my life ever since the late 70s, when I responded to an ad for a line of new “microgames” from a company called Metagaming. I saw the above ad on the inside cover of Analog magazine, which I started reading with the April 1997 issue, when I was 12 years old. Responding to ads in comics and magazines was something you did in the 70s; don’t…

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October Short Story Roundup

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The last few weeks have been particularly busy for me in my real life (as opposed to the one I lead as a dashing blogger-about-town on all things old school Swords & Sorcery) so this won’t be as complete a roundup as I’d like it to be. Fantasy Scroll #3 will have to wait until next month. As for Beneath Ceaseless Skies, I failed to read either issue last month, but looking at October’s authors, I see World Fantasy Award-winning (for…

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Finding Your Groove in NaNoWriMo: The Rhythm of Writing

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NaNoWriMo rumbles on. Some of my friends report impressive word counts. Others are strangely silent. Possibly some of these last have plotted themselves into a corner. The best way around this is to consider your conflicts, who the players are, but I’ve talked about that. However, I suspect a lot of people who are stalled have got caught up in a war of attrition with the mechanics of narrative. We take narrative for granted. It’s what we do in the…

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On the Road to Khurdisan: Brak the Barbarian by John Jakes

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For people of a certain age (the pushing-fifty crowd) John Jakes is probably best known for The Kent Family Chronicles, his massive series of massive books about American history and the mini-series made from the first one, The Bastard. Hearing that title said out loud on TV was a pretty shocking thing for us kids back in 1978. It wasn’t until I was a little older that I discovered John Jakes had started his career as a real journeyman pulp…

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Black Gate Interviews C.S.E. Cooney: From Metaphor To Manticore

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Writer C.S.E. Cooney has published two stories in the mighty trove of Black Gate‘s online fiction catalog, “Life On the Sun,” and its prequel, “Godmother Lizard.” For the following interview, she and I met in the cavernous vaults of Black Gate‘s Indiana compound, where we lounged on Ottoman divans surrounded by steampunk tapestries and several thousand of John O’Neill’s second favorite sci-fi paperbacks. The results, transcribed by a Silicon Valley drone powered entirely by herbal tea, are as follows: What do you…

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The Savage Influence of Doc Savage

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Today I’m turning over the Black Gate rostrum to the talented Jonathan Wood. Take it away, Jonathan! Doc Savage is one of the most influential and poorly known literary characters of all time. Forget Cthulhu, if you’re really looking for a pulp-era monster that’s torn through 20th century popular culture, he’s your man. But you won’t know him, because when you do encounter him, he’s always in disguise. But make no mistake, he’s there. Because he’s Superman. He’s Indiana Jones….

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Art of the Genre: The Top 10 Dragon Magazine Covers of the 1970s & 80s

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Today would have been the 56th birthday of artist Keith Parkinson, and so I dedicate this post to his memory. Over on my own Art of the Genre site, I talk a lot about Dragon Magazine.  And why not, there are tons of them, and most are filled with great artwork. Typically, I review at least one Dragon a week, and after doing this for a couple of years I felt it was high time I composed one of my…

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