Search Results for: New Edge Sword

Howard’s Forgotten Redhead: Dark Agnes

Comments 2 comments

It’s strange that Robert E. Howard’s most famous female character is one he didn’t actually create: Red Sonja, the work of comic book writer Roy Thomas and artist Barry Windsor-Smith, based on the historic adventuress Red Sonya from the story “The Shadow of the Vulture.” Red Sonja has been erroneously credited to Howard for years; even the movie Red Sonja lists him as the creator on the main credits. This accidental attribution might explain the scant attention given to a…

Read More Read More

Who Gods There?: “The Elder Gods” by Don A. Stuart

Comments 3 comments

I’m guest-blogging this week at Babel Clash, along with fellow Pyr author Matt Sturges, and for the past couple days we’ve been kicking around the topic of our influences and anti-influences. It’s not always the biggest books or the best that are influences, though. For instance… Don A. Stuart‘s “The Elder Gods” is a fantasy novella from the late 1930s that reads a lot like the science fiction being written around the same time. That’s no accident: the author behind…

Read More Read More

The Greatest Harryhausen: The Golden Voyage of Sinbad

Comments 16 comments

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974) Directed by Gordon Hessler. Starring John Philip Law, Tom Baker, Caroline Munro, Douglas Wilmer, Martin Shaw, Kurt Christian, Grégoire Aslan, Takis Emmanuel. “Every voyage has its own flavor.” Recently on this blog, I wrote about one of the more ignored of Ray Harryhausen’s films, The 3 Worlds of Gulliver. This inspired me to review two other films of his that don’t get enough attention—the underwhelming H. G. Wells adaptation The First Men in the…

Read More Read More

The Real d’Artagnan

Comments 2 comments

The portrait Dumas paints of d’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers is iconic: a penniless young Gascon who sets off for Paris on a horse that has seen better days, armed with his father’s sword, an ointment his mother made that “miraculously heals any wound that doesn’t reach the heart”, and a letter of recommendation to M. de Trèville, captain of the King’s Musketeers.  From such humble beginnings are heroes made.  But, how accurate a portrait is it? For The Three…

Read More Read More

On the Other Hand–Amen: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny. Volume One: Threshold; Volume Two: Power and Light

Comments 3 comments

Who was the greatest American fantasist of the 20th century? People will have their own notions about this (as opposed to the greatest British fantasist of the 20th century, where most lists will begin with Tolkien). Personally, I think Fritz Leiber is several of the century’s greatest fantasists, and other obvious candidates would include Robert E. Howard, Kuttner and Moore, Leigh Brackett, Jack Vance, Ursula Le Guin. John Crowley has his advocates; no doubt there are others. One name I…

Read More Read More

Rogue Blades Entertainment releases Rage of the Behemoth

Comments 5 comments

Heroic fantasy anthologies are a rare sight these dates.  And those willing to to take a gamble on emerging authors – virtually non-existant. But don’t tell that to Jason M. Waltz, publisher of Rogue Blades Entertainment, and editor of Return of the Sword (2008) and the brand spanking new Rage of the Behemoth: An Anthology of Heroic Adventure.  Described as “Almost 150,000 words of monstrous mayhem recording the ferocious battles that rage between gargantuan creatures of myth and legend, and the…

Read More Read More

The People That Time Forgot: The Movie

Comments 2 comments

The People That Time Forgot (1977) Directed by Kevin Connor. Starring Patrick Wayne, Doug McClure, Sarah Douglas, Dana Gillespie, Thorley Walters, Shane Rimmer, David Prowse, Milton Reid. Amicus Productions waited two years to release a sequel to their hit The Land That Time Forgot, stopping along the way to do another Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation, At the Earth’s Core. The People That Time Forgot marks the last gasp for its brand of low-budget fantasy/adventure film, since another film that came…

Read More Read More

Kobolds Ate My Baby! Super Deluxx Edition

Comments 3 comments

Kobolds Ate My Baby! Super Deluxx Edition By Chris O’Neill and Dan Landis. Illustrated by John Kovalic. (Dork Storm Press, 2005; $14.99) I’ve previously mentioned in a comment thread that when it comes to tabletop role-playing games, I lean toward the rules-lite side of the equation. I’d rather have a system that allows flexible play, with minimal die-rolls and looking up charts, and greater focus on the “role-playing” instead of the “game.” Given a good Game Master, rules-lite games can…

Read More Read More

You got your Zombies in my Pride and Prejudice!

Comments 3 comments

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies By Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith (Quirk Classics, 2009) I love the genre of “re-contextualizing,” taking a work of art, regardless of its qualities, and slamming it into a new setting to see what happens. This can come from a Warholian perspective, or it can be done with the humorous ocean of pop-culture parody in Mystery Science Theater 3000 (which I have no hesitation in naming my favorite television show ever). Re-contextualization can be as…

Read More Read More

The Blish Is Back: James Blish’s The Warriors of Day

Comments 4 comments

I thought I was done with this series of posts on planetary romance, a.k.a. sword-and planet, at least until the new edition of Kline’s Outlaws of Mars comes out. But then I came across a reference to James Blish’s Sword of Xota (a.k.a. The Warriors of Day). I had a hard time believing it was for real. Blish, the hardnosed “‘Sour Bill’ Atheling”, the apostle of modernism in literature and Spenglerism in history, the author of the quadruply ambitious trilogy…

Read More Read More