Blog Archives
sWhole swaths of my commentary gets accused of being “errors of pattern-matching”, but the thing is… there does turn out to be more than just coincidence involved in the connections and trends I’ve been pointing out. And as this episode of Geek Gab: On the Books reveals… sometimes there’s an explicit connection even in places where […]
Hooc Ott dropped a blog post-sized comment on Jon Del Arroz’s post about cultural differences between the two main factions in the science fiction and fantasy scene: A divide I have found is Christian and post-Christian atheist. Throw a rock at a crowd of Pulp revolutionaries and you will hit a Christian 9 out of […]
A “geoffrey” over at the ODD74 boards has this comment on the subject of Appendix N: I think it takes about 200 years before a civilization can assuredly judge literature. During the century a book is written, it partakes of the nature of that century. The century after a book is written, the civilization is […]
Son of the Pulps Part 2: Farmer’s Tarzans
Saturday , 10, June 2017 Appendix N, Authors, Book Review, Fiction 6 CommentsTarzan as imagined by Edgar Rice Burroughs is a vivid hero that epitomizes full-blooded adventure and influenced generations of writers. The Tarzan of Jose Philip Farmer is better; the ultimate, indomitable hero and my favorite fictional character. As we noted in last week’s column, Farmer was utterly fascinated with Tarzan and wrote several different pastiches […]
Ken St. Andre’s role in the earliest stages of the development of a roleplaying games can be summed up in one sentence. It’s on the opening page of the first edition of Chaosium’s Runequest, where a small note reads, “DEDICATED to Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, who first opened Pandora’s Box, and to Ken St. Andre, […]
Son of the Pulps: Philip Jose Farmer, Part 1
Saturday , 3, June 2017 Appendix N, Authors, Fiction, Short Fiction 4 CommentsIt’s often been asked what later science fiction writers the pulp masters influenced. I wager there were many, even when it’s not directly obvious from the works themselves. For instance, the adventurousness of Heinlein’s stories and his classic heroes remind me strongly of the best pulp authors. But speculation aside, of all the great science […]
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year contemplating what the followup to Appendix N should be. Before the Big Three: The Real Golden Age of Science Fiction? Appendix T: the Literary Antecedents of Traveller? A Survey of Contemporary Short SFF? What hadn’t crossed my mind until now was the fact that I may […]
Reaction Time: Old School Gaming and Appendix N
Thursday , 1, June 2017 Appendix N, Tabletop Games 14 CommentsOver at Save Versus All Wands, a post about a throwaway blog comment of mine has gotten record levels of traffic. Which is ironic, because I would have thought such sentiments would have been completely unremarkable among “old school” gamers. Fortunately, some people get it. I find Steve Queen’s comment there to be particularly cogent: […]
Over at the OD&D Discussion boards, things have (predictably) begun to heat up. The intensity of the response is so baffling, it has prompted this question from the forum denizen known as The Perilous Dreamer: Would someone fill me in on why there is so much hate for jeffro and for this book, because I […]
You know, it was always a bit of a mystery to me why it was that Appendix N discussion seemed to arbitrarily evaporate several years ago. Just like it was strange to me when the audience for my material turned out to be much more the sort of people that were looking for decent fantasy […]
THROWBACK SF THURSDAY: The Secret of the Sinharat and People of the Talisman by Leigh Brackett
Thursday , 25, May 2017 Appendix N 16 CommentsMy exposure to Brackett had been all of one short story, but for some reason I’ve long associated her with Edgar Rice Burroughs. After reading these two novellas, I think the better comparison is to Robert E. Howard (more on that in a bit). Whoever it is, I have no doubt that Brackett deserves to […]
I just got some interesting feedback from David R. Megarry on an old post: I fail to see why nobody looks at the journey through the Caves of Moira when they do a comparison between Tolkien and D&D. The description is a perfect example of a dungeon crawl. It is the image I had in […]