Blog Archives
sFairy Stories and Beyond Baum’s Wizard of Oz
Saturday , 1, April 2017 Authors, Before the Big Three, Fiction 21 Comments“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” – C.S. […]
Kairos: “Tor Books knows that The Corroding Empire isn’t a counterfeit meant to ride on the coattails of their success. It’s a parody in the venerable literary tradition of calling out emperors with no clothes. It also stands as a solid sci-fi novel in its own right, and even surpasses the subject of its lampooning, as […]
Valerian and Laureline: Ambassador of the Shadows
Thursday , 23, March 2017 Comics, Fiction 12 CommentsIn the 1960s, while working in America, writer Pierre Christin and illustrator Jean-Claude Mézières met to collaborate on their next bande dessinée (BD) comic serial. Both men originally wanted to draw a Western, but the market in France had already been saturated with such stories. Instead, they turned to their other great American literary love, science fiction, […]
Indie New Releases – January 2017
Thursday , 9, March 2017 Appendix N, Book Review, Fiction 3 CommentsWhile an invading empire shells planets into volcanic glass all around him, a cloned space captain must decide whether he will take on the memories of a fallen war hero – and his military command. In Britain’s third space war, the Royal Navy must strike deep into the territory of the alien Foxes to bring […]
Spengler is chiefly known for his political columns, but back in 2003, he wrote an unusually perceptive article in the Asia Times about the close relationship between Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings and Wagner and the Ring Cycle. Tolkien well may have written his epic as an “anti-Ring” to repair the damage that […]
This is a piece that I wrote 12 years ago for a collection of essays on Lin Carter with the horrible title of Apostle of Letters. Maybe 30 copies of the book were sold. There were some good essays in the book and some not so good essays. Anyway, I make the case there was […]
On Yanthus Prime, a femme fatale must turn cat burglar, teaming with an intelligent insect swarm to stay one step ahead of the Mob’s clutches. On Earth, a fighter pilot is kidnapped by an alien spaceship and forced to become an interstellar janissary. In a galaxy far away, a bulletproof thug tries to keep his space […]
When I had heard that Larry Correia had written a fantasy novel, I took notice. The only fiction of his that I had read was “The Great Sea Beast” in Kaiju Rising. His story really stuck out in comparison to the rest of the stories in that anthology. This past summer, I read “The Keeper […]
SUPERVERSIVE: The Dark Brilliance of “A Series of Unfortunate Events”
Tuesday , 27, December 2016 Book Review, Fiction, Superversive 9 CommentsLemony Snicket’s (the pen name of Daniel Handler) “A Series of Unfortunate Events” is making the news again now that a new Netflix series is coming out. After the okay but ultimately disappointing movie adaptation the trailers for the Netflix series look as if they’re really going to get things right, even if Neil Patrick Harris […]
Forthcoming: Straight Out of Tombstone
Thursday , 22, December 2016 Fiction, News, Short Fiction 2 CommentsA visit to Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter Nation site had this forthcoming book listed. I am always up for a weird western. The form has pulp roots with stories by Otis Adelbert Kline, S. Omar Barker, and Arthur J. Burks in the pages of Weird Tales and Strange Tales. Robert E. Howard wrote a handful […]
Within the past year, three small press magazines have appeared: the resurrected Weirdbook, Cirsova, and now Skelos. Weird Tales appears to be permanently dead. Modern technology has allowed home publishing, something you could only dream about doing twenty years ago. Skelos takes its name from The Book of Skelos, a forbidden tome mentioned in […]
SUPERVERSIVE Full Review: “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”
Tuesday , 22, November 2016 Fiction, Superversive 4 Comments(My quick review is here.) I have a love-hate thing going on with J.K. Rowling. On one hand, her personal and political opinions are obnoxious, nasty, contemptible, and make it very, very clear that she hates and despises people who think like me. And that’s not even to TOUCH the “Dumbledore is gay” controversy. ON […]