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sRobert Jordan’s The Eye of the World in 1990 was the beginning of the era of the big, fat fantasy. That era continues to the present with George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, which may or may not ever be finished (like Jordan). The term “epic fantasy” is sometimes used for […]
Hans-Christian Vortisch has started blogging– and if you are any shade of gun nut, his site will blow you away. This post on H. P. Lovecraft’s guns is fascinating even if it’s patently obvious that the man wouldn’t have lasted twenty minutes in a Call of Cthulhu game. And this in depth piece on the Heckler & […]
Short Reviews – Battlefield in Black by George A. Whittington
Friday , 15, January 2016 Book Review 11 CommentsBattlefield in Black by George A. Whittington appeared in the Fall 1945 issue of Planet Stories. Captain Jon McPartland has problems. His girlfriend Almira is the daughter of Marshal Denton, “Supreme Commander of all Solar System forces”. The peoples of Earth and her solar colonies are governed by a “Congress of Specialists”, which is sort […]
Following comic books in the mid-eighties was tough for a kid. You had the choice between picking up slightly bent up copies from gas station spinner racks or else dropping a chunk of allowance money upfront so that the mailman could mangle them month to month. (And yeah, this was hard to bear either way, […]
At Castalia House there is some excitement over the rumored re-release of TSR’s classic fantasy board game, Divine Right. It seems that Excalibre Games has the rights to produce an update. I decided to check out the company and while looking over their catalogue noticed a couple of interesting titles. Today is a “two for […]
This book has pretty much everything: transparent aluminum from Star Trek IV, space boots from Star Trek VI, ATVs from classic Traveller, a Hunter straight out of Supplement 4: Citizens of the Imperium, stellar maps from Starfire, and (most importantly) slide rules. Even better, there’s a solid reason for people having to use them out in […]
Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, and E. Hoffmann Price
Sunday , 10, January 2016 Uncategorized 1 CommentDoing this series on Leigh Brackett shook some things loose. Don Herron (The Dark Barbarian, Willeford) contacted me offering some scans of interesting items. He has been selling books from the E. Hoffmann Price library. E. Hoffmann Price was a pulp fictioneer who wrote about 500 stories from the middle 1920s to the early 1950s. […]
Gaiseric over at The Dark Heritage blog has a great post that sheds some light on the relationship between Appendix N and the fantasy canon as it stood during the mid-seventies: One point that Jeffro has made repeatedly, but which still seems to bypass the thought processes of many, is that the Appendix N is […]
Short Reviews – Grifters’ Asteroid by H.L. Gold (as Harold C. Fosse)
Friday , 8, January 2016 Book Review 4 Comments“Short Reviews” are my reviews of short science fiction stories. Sometimes the reviews themselves are short, but not always. I started off covering some 70s Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, but have moved to focusing on older pulps (Planet Stories right now). The purpose of this series is let people know what kinds of stories were […]
Air Assault on Crete endeavors to recreate the German’s audacious attempt at the theretofore unattempted, an entirely airborne military invasion by several battalions of Fallschirmjaeger, and the fighting retreat and evacuation of Allied personnel in the aftermath. This game is hard. Very hard. Part of why it is hard is because it is rules heavy […]
Jon Peterson at Playing at the World has posted Bruce Sterling’s homebrew samurai class from 1978. It’s quite good, actually. The restrictions of the Samurai Code will force the player character to commit seppuku if he’s wounded and retreats without returning a wound to his opponent. The class’s special abilities are doled out in a similar […]
This newly discovered Lovecraft letter is quite the find. Even better, you don’t have to travel to some New England area university library to get a look at it. (I’ve noticed that people with a grossly batrachian aspect tend to trail me when I’m in that neck of the woods anyway.) That’s right, the whole thing […]