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This is unmitigated fan fiction. It is brazen and utterly shameless about it, too. As I read this I kept looking back to the front to confirm that these stories really did appear within the pages of Weird Tales magazine. They really did! Evidently the editor liked them well enough for it to be worth their time to keep […]

Fantasy did in fact exist before the advent of the watered down Tolkien pastiche. To someone that didn’t grow up with older books, they’re almost impossible to imagine. So it was for me when I first heard that Michael Moorcock was, in effect, the Anti-Tolkien¹. I mean… how could such a thing even be when for all […]

Stanley G. Weinbaum is another of those names whose cachet depends a great deal on the age of the person you’re talking to. In one generation, he would have immediately been recognizable as a major literary figure, on par with someone like Edgar Rice Burroughs in terms of his raw influence. In the next… the […]

This book is just plain good. As far as I’m concerned, Leigh Brackett’s work can sit on my shelf in a place of honor right beside the work of A. Merritt and Edgar Rice Burroughs. And I’m not the only person that’s had that reaction. Ace actually thought this novel was good enough to run opposite […]

This is another of those stories that starts off with the protagonist suffering from amnesia. Now, that might seem like a tiresome cliché by now… but really, the freakier your setting is the more that sort of thing starts to look like a great trick for gradually easing the reader in to just how everything works. […]

This book is superb. It’s not just a rip roaring yarn, either. It also explains a great deal about old school fantasy that you’re liable to have not even wondered about. For instance, it reveals that the most important “half elf” race throughout history was not the product of an epic elf/human romance, but was […]

SPOILER WARNING: Before we start this one, let me say that if you have not read Lovecraft’s Mythos stories, you need to stop reading me and start reading him. I was irked at first by the fact that this particular volume did not put the tales in the order in which they were published. However reading […]

I’ve resigned myself to the fact that there’s only so many writers in the same league as H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Jack Vance. And it’s tough sometimes. I mean… what am I going to do when I finally finish their last books…? Coming across Fritz Leiber as part of this series though, […]

Postapocalyptic fiction in the tradition of Mad Max II and Planet of the Apes was not merely a byproduct of seventies era dystopianism. Indeed, the genre goes back surprisingly far. Just seven years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Andre Norton presented everything you’d need to run a pretty fair Gamma World campaign. It’s got […]

This is pretty much the original source for what ended up becoming TSR’s Gamma World setting. Oh, there are differences, sure. The equivalent of the surviving “pure strain humans” here almost all have some degree of telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance. There is nothing quite like the mutated plant creatures of the game. And there’s a complete lack […]

First published in 1924, Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter was rescued from obscurity by Lin Carter’s work with the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. It was an excellent choice for that project, too. Here we find the forgotten themes that set up the cadence of twentieth century fantasy literature. Here we have a take on […]

This book is pretty wild. I mean, you don’t just see an unstoppable foe here cut from the same cloth as Steve Jackson’s Ogre cybertanks or Steve Cole’s Star Fleet Universe Andromedan invaders. You get to see one of the earlier iterations of what would become Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s Borg, sure. But you […]