Blog Archives

It won’t be long before the stuff nobody was talking about becomes the stuff that “everybody knows.” That being the case, I thought it’d be worth delving into the nitty gritty of just what exactly people knew and when they knew it when it came to the question of the Castle Amber D&D module’s connection […]

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 […]

I 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 […]

The pulps take a real beating in the press. You know the litany of slurs that are deployed every time old school science fiction and fantasy comes up. Even people that appreciate some of the classics feel compelled to denounce aspects of them just as they would tend to distance themselves from controversial political figures […]

Nethereal was already the talk of the town it got book bombed by Larry Correia. The buzz shot up another order of magnitude when its author decided to book bomb himself in response to this year’s Hugo kerfuffle. Thanks to DragonCon, Nethereal‘s sequel became the first Indie title to win a major award. It was […]

Ray Bradbury called him the most influential writer in the entire history of the world. What are people saying on his birthday today…? Bob Leeper at Nerdvana emphasizes the epic scope of the man’s influence: “If the artists, authors and filmmakers who created every single one of those pop culture mainstays, and the professionals who […]

We’ve spent a lot of time here delving into the ups and downs of several movements within science fiction and fantasy– the Campbellian Revolution, the New Wave, the tremendous changes that occurred in publishing in the late seventies, etc. We’ve broken stories here uncovering how both fandom and publishing are pretty well divorced from the […]

If the pulp ethos can be summed into just one thing, it’s this: There is always a woman. It’s in everything, really. No matter how outrageous the setting, how dangerous the threat, or how weird the the situation is in the opening hook, honestly… it’s all just prelude for the entrance of a dame. Whether […]

The literary inspirations of Traveller are significantly harder to pin down in comparison to D&D. In the first place, there is no counterpart to the “Appendix N” list in the pages of its core rules. The idea that the game could have drawn from a diverse range of short fiction is thus something that most […]

Back before I did the Appendix N survey, I really didn’t think too much of short stories. I know I skipped over them in things like Dragon and Omni magazine back in the eighties. The ads for things like Amazing Stories just weren’t that convincing at the time, either. I couldn’t imagine it being worth […]