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March – 2022 – castaliahouse.com

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Fantasy (Ken Lizzi): Swords and Sorcery fiction provides us with exciting action in memorable settings. It also drops terrific characters into those settings and lets them run free. Some of those characters have stood the test of time. I’ve selected ten of those that I consider the pantheon of the genre. There is no science […]

E. C. Tubb’s “Dumarest of Terra” ran for thirty-three novels from 1967 through 1997. Ace Books published the first eight novels. Donald A. Wollheim took the series with him to DAW Books from 1973 through 1985. Wollheim’s daughter, Betsy, appeared to have purged a lot of her father’s favorites in the mid-1980s when she took […]

Jay Allan’s Blood on the Star space opera series concludes this week with Empire Reborn, the 18th in the series. Blood on the Stars has earned praise on this blog as the successor to Honor Harrington. Will its conclusion live up to the Salamander’s? While that review will be written soon, here’s a retrospective of […]

Next week’s SFF New Release will be postponed to 5 April 2022. Blessed Time 3: Dakkora’s Legacy – Cale Plamann A New Threat Arises, And Time Itself May Not Be Enough Retirement or polite exile. Whatever you want to call it, it had been kind to Micah Silver. He had saved his home of Basil’s […]

Firearms (Firearms News): Three decades ago, if you asked anyone who was a handgunner or firearm enthusiast, “What’s the best handgun for self-defense or woods carry?” the majority of the time the .357 Magnum would have been their reply. Its high velocity, impressive terminal performance and deep penetration provides stellar performance not only in terms […]

Gaming tie-in fiction is something I had actively avoided for years. I read the anthology Realms of Valor (1993) set in the Forgotten Realms universe which I thought was overall bad. I thought the R. A. Salvatore story much better than the other fiction. As a result, I just avoided gaming tie-in fiction. I never […]

“Let us in,” said Mangos. “We’re here to kill your dragons.” “And I wish you the best of luck. Best you carry a cask of dipping sauce. You’ll taste better that way.” Mangos is the Mongoose, a skilled, boastful, and hotheaded swordsman, while Kat is the Meerkat, a beautiful yet mysterious woman who favors the […]

Artifact (Saturn’s Legacy #1) – Joshua James Lowell Carpenter is a disgraced Marine assigned to a remote US research station on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, where scientists have made an extraordinary discovery in the ocean below. A special forces team, led by Lowell’s murderous former commanding officer, shows up to investigate. Almost immediately, everything begins to […]

Science Fiction (Bloody Disgusting): Sometime in the spring of 1937, while still struggling to make any sort of living as a writer, he pitched an idea to the editor of Argosy magazine, Jack Byrne, to use the thushol from “Brain-Stealers” in a horror story set on earth. Byrne liked the idea and Campbell set out […]

Enigmas drive art. The first one there creating something new was the square peg that is perceived as an odd ball, the loser, the outcast. One type of movie that I realized that I like watching is the bio-pic about artistic types who struggle with family, life, society. These sort of movies are different. I […]

“Race, you’re one in a million of your kind–and I guess that I am one in a million of mine. Come! I’ll give you a name as feared as yours. They call me ‘The Red Peril’.”  I just gasped up at her. This slip of a girl, the most notorious woman burglar the underworld has […]

Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves – Jonathan Moeller Gareth Arban wants to become a knight and win glory enough to marry the girl he loves. But death is the other face of glory. When invaders sweep out of the north wielding mighty dark magic, it will take more than a squire’s bravery to stop them […]