Yearly Archives:
sSuperversive Press is here, and for their first offering they serve up a bit of short dystopian fiction for your edification. Who is the author lampooning: Soviet Russia or the Pacific Northwest…? And what is the titular “product”? Is it pulp fantasy or vintage role-playing games? (Oh come on, you know it could have been!) […]
There’s no nice way to put it. Oh, I suppose I could invoke differing schools of thought on how this sort of thing is done. I could call one an “old school” approach and another the “new school” way. The latter would still be taken as derogatory. The former would provoke testimonials from people claiming […]
The 2016 H. P. Lovecraft Re-read: The Shadow Over Innsmouth
Sunday , 16, October 2016 Fiction 4 CommentsLovecraft followed up “At the Mountains of Madness” with “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” He wrote the story in November 1931 with a few different drafts. The story is 27,026 words long, so it is a little longer than “The Whisperer in Darkness.” Lovecraft wrote a story not about cosmic entities from other dimensions this time. […]
SUPERVERSIVE ROUNDTABLE: Do Conservatives and Liberals write Sci Fi differently?
Sunday , 16, October 2016 Superversive 1 CommentIt’s a big, rambling conversation that touches on decades worth of film, comics, fiction, and politics that you won’t want to miss! And if you were hoping for a good, hard and fast answer to this… well… this isn’t it. Several points about this question can be accounted for as a function of genre binning, […]
We keep playing this and making slight adjustments between sessions. Progress seems nonexistent and sometimes I wonder if an earlier incarnation of what we were doing might have been better. But looking at the initial outline for this scenario, I really can’t believe what’s not on it…! We had a problem with the game devolving […]
Short Reviews – Stalemate in Space, by Charles L. Harness
Friday , 14, October 2016 Book Review, Uncategorized Leave a commentStalemate in Space by Charles L. Harness appeared in the Summer 1949 issue of Planet Stories. It can be read here at Archive.org. So far, I’ve read plenty of stories with great dames who are gorgeous, brave, competent and excellent foils for their male counterparts. But Stalemate in Space is the first Raygun Romance I’ve […]
SHORT FICTION: “The Spaces Between” by Pete Rawlik
Thursday , 13, October 2016 Short Fiction Leave a commentI used to look forward to taking in a movie or two every year. Somewhere around the turn of the century, though… it just seemed like everything was a reworking of either the first Star Wars movie (aka “A New Hope”) or The Wrath of Khan. Sure, the computer graphics and special effects improved over […]
SENSOR SWEEP: Artistic Dead Ends, Deep Ruts, Old-Fashioned Elements, and Philosophical Romance
Wednesday , 12, October 2016 Sensor Sweep 10 CommentsPulp Revolution (The Puppy of the Month Book Club) Author Interview: Brian Niemeier — “In hindsight, I think it’s safe to say that the Soul Cycle—Nethereal in particular—is responding to the same creative exhaustion in contemporary genre fiction that’s motivated the pulp revival. Almost every story released by the major movie studios and publishing houses […]
WARGAME WEDNESDAY: Crisis: 2000, A Game of Fourth Generation War
Wednesday , 12, October 2016 Wargames 2 CommentsThe inclusion of a complete wargame has long been a staple of magazines dedicated to the tabletop wargame hobby. The tangible difficulties are minimal, as the physical requirements are limited to a foldable paper map and a few counters, and the marketing value obvious. At the cost of a (relatively) expensive sheet of counters, a […]
Peter Schweighofer over at Hobby Games Recce weighs in on the recent uptick in Appendix N discussion with a bit of cautionary advice: I’d encourage D&D or OSR gamers of the more literary persuasion to use these lists as a starting point, but would emphasize them to explore fantasy literature on their own – particularly […]
SUPERVERSIVE Review: The Peripheral by William Gibson
Tuesday , 11, October 2016 Superversive, Uncategorized 3 CommentsThe problem with cyberpunk is that it generated a handful of wonderful, iconic works and then as far as I can tell, it just sort of disappeared. On one hand, I think we left behind the context that birthed it pretty drastically in the 1990s. On the other hand, as I understand it, both William […]
Swan Knight’s Son: Talking Animals, Creepy Elves, Valiant Knights, and Pulp Overload!
Monday , 10, October 2016 Appendix N 6 CommentsI admit it. I never did “get” the whole thing with talking animal stories when I was a kid. It always seemed self-evident to me that Tolkien’s Middle-Earth was superior in every way to C. S. Lewis’s Narnia. How could anyone not see that?! And judging from the commentary on John C. Wright’s “The Parliament […]