Blog Archives
sA year ago, I wrote about C. J. Chivers’ The Gun. I just read another book about the AK-47 assault rifle. This one being Larry Kahaner’s AK-47: The Weapon That Changed the Face of War. This is the earlier book (2008), while Chivers’ book came out in 2011. AK-47 begins with the assault on Baghdad […]
We now come to the last four stories in The Philip K. Dick Reader. These are also stories all made into movies. “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (F&SF April 1966): The story that became the movie Total Recall. Douglas Quail is an office worker with an obsession of going to Mars. The wife […]
Racial memory/ancestral memory/genetic memory– a concept used in fiction for fantastic effects for 140 years. H. Rider Haggard used the idea in The Ancient Allan, Jack London in The Star Rover, Edwin Lester Arnold’s Phra the Phoenician, and Robert E. Howard’s “James Allison” stories. Someone in the present remembering a past life of an ancestor. […]
I have looked at three of four novel by Marvin Albert writing as “Ian MacAlister:” Skylark Mission, Strike Force 7, and Valley of the Assassins. I had some luck at the end of summer finding the last, Driscoll’s Diamonds. I have been enthusiastic about Albert’s novels. Some consider Driscoll’s Diamonds the best of the lot. […]
Legends 3: Stories in Honour of David Gemmell
Sunday , 13, December 2020 Book Review Leave a commentThe David Gemmell Awards For Fantasy honored the best in fantasy fiction and artwork as chosen by the readers from 2009 to 2018. The awards were for traditional, heroic, epic, and high fantasy genres. There were some accompanying book anthologies of fantasy fiction: Legends (2013), Legends II (2015), and Legends 3 (2019). I just found […]
Mark Voger’s Monster Mash is a look at “The Creepy, Kooky Monster Craze in America 1957-1972.” This is a hardback book from Two Morrow Publishing from 2015. I got this book thinking it would be an overview of horror from 1957-1972. No, this covers monsters in popular culture in that period. The book has six […]
Around fifteen years ago, there was an online magazine, Flashing Swords. One story that stayed with me was William King’s “Guardian of the Dawn.” The story stood above others in delivery. It featured Kormak, a member of an order that fights servants of darkness. “Guardian of the Dawn” was dark and moody with a strong […]
This is a guest post by Richard who has contributed a few pieces before: Edward Frankland’s Forgotten Masterpiece There can be few people these days familiar with the work of Edward Frankland (1884-1958). And even amongst this minority far fewer still will be conversant with his 1932 novel of Viking Westmorland entitled HUGE AS […]
The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly III
Sunday , 19, July 2020 Book Review, Short Fiction 1 CommentEvery two years, a new Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly volume is out. I reviewed Volume 1 in 2016, Volume II in 2018. The Best of Heroic Fantasy III covers 2013-2015. Format is trade paperback. Cover is classic sword and sorcery by Robert Zoltan, 289 pages of text with a few end pages on Kickstarter […]
We are in the middle of a small press fiction golden age – Weirdbook, Tales from the Magician’s Skull, Storyhack, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly come to mind. It reminds me of the old D.I.Y. attitude in punk and alternative music in the late 1970s though the 80s. It is hard to believe that I reviewed the […]
David J. West has been writing heroic fantasy, horror, and weird westerns for the past ten years. Sometimes he uses the name James Alderdice for some of his fiction. Whispers of the Goddess (Lost Realms Press, 2014) is a collection of fantasy stories with an historical setting originally published under the name of James Alderdice. […]
Ashoka: Satrap of Taxila by Ashok K. Banker (Westland Publications, 2017). The K. stands for Kumar. I don’t know if Ashok K. Banker goes to the White Castle. I had read somewhere that Ashok Banker said that he liked Robert E. Howard. I remember seeing the Ramayana books published by Aspect/Warner in 2004. I thought […]