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At least three of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s series are part of the same continuity: both Tarzan and events from the Pellucidar series are mentioned in this first novel in the Venus series. The Mars series would have been brought in here as well as the protagonist fully intended to go there. Alas, his calculations for his […]

When a Connecticut born mining operator goes to visit his dilettante paleontologist friend that has constructed a “mechanical subterranean prospector,” an “iron mole” with “a mighty revolving drill” capable of tunneling through the earth at unparalleled speed, things quickly go off the rails. Not five paragraphs into the story, the two are on board the hundred […]

This book is terribly and embarrassingly flawed. It’s a shame since it’s otherwise full of great imagery delivered at a brisk tempo. Every chapter seems to have a new shade or tone that contrasts with the previous one, but it ultimately falls apart. I’m impressed that Zelazny could whip up something like this in a […]

Even as a kid I always understood that there was something portentous about the Barsoom series paperbacks on the shelf at the library. Nevertheless, I’d always passed them over for books by authors that got more credit as being “grandmasters” of science fiction. I just couldn’t take Edgar Rice Burroughs’s books seriously at the time. That’s a […]

In just a few short weeks of reading influential books from fifty years ago, we’ve seen magic that could reduce civilizations to chaotic wastelands just on the basis of the incentives it created. We’ve seen clerics boldly face down alien marauders, secure in the knowledge that demons and devils cannot harm them. We’ve seen science and myth collide, […]

One of the longstanding debates in gaming circles is which of the core Dungeons & Dragons classes are least necessary to the game. Few people challenge the place of either fighting men¹ or magic-users on the roster. Indeed, Steve Jackson’s first role playing game was built around just those two archetypes, which isn’t surprising given […]

One reason I enjoy reading the older science fiction and fantasy stories is that they are so much more often free from overt politicization. For a good bad example, look no further than the Next Generation Star Trek episode that has Tasha Yar attempting to explain to Wesley Crusher why it is that people get hooked on […]

The writing of Jack Vance is striking, inventive, and vividly descriptive. His stories are superb, but his books haven’t always been easy to track down. Consequently he’s often remembered just for inadvertently providing the template for the magic system in Dungeons & Dragons. In that game, a magic-user could spend time studying to learn a set number […]