Blog Archives
sGriots A Sword and Soul Anthology/ Edited by Milton J. Davis & Charles R. Saunders (Mvmedia, LLC, Fayetteville, GA. 2011) Back in 1979, Andrew J. Offutt had this to say in the introduction to Charles R. Saunders’ story “Mai-Kulala” in the book Swords Against Darkness IV: “Charles Saunders hopes to sell an anthology of hf […]
One sort of fiction that skirts the periphery of sword and sorcery fiction is the cave-man tale. Robert E. Howard’s first story in Weird Tales (“Spear and Fang”) was stone age yarn. P. Schuyler Miller’s “The People of the Arrow” (Amazing Stories, July 1935) is an interesting prehistoric story of genocidal warfare. Miller (1912-1974) was […]
Weird Tales magazine was dealt a double blow with the deaths of Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft. At the same time, Clark Ashton Smith cut his fiction production by more than half. Fortunately, two Lovecraft protégés stepped in to fill the gap in the late 1930s– Robert Bloch and Henry Kuttner. Robert Bloch […]
Planet Stories is one of the places where sword and sorcery fiction went undercover from the mid 1940s to the early 1950s. The magazine published unabashed adventure fiction with pseudo-scientific trappings. Space fantasy is a good term for this sort of fiction. Leigh Brackettt, Ross Rocklynne, Bryce Walton, Emmett McDowell, Albert de Pina, and Ray […]
Otis Adelbert Kline was a middling writer for the pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s. He was present in the very first issue of Weird Tales, March 1923. His last story, co-written with Frank Belknap Long was in the July 1943 issue of Weird Tales. One of his novels from Weird Tales is “Tam, […]
Sword and planet fiction is a form generally associated with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom/John Carter, Amtor/Carson Napier, Moon Maid/Moon Men series. In the pulp era there were imitations, the most famous probably Otis Adelbert Kline. The form did exist through the 1940s evolving into a more hard boiled fiction in the hands of Leigh Brackett. […]
Ace Books had its part in the history of sword and sorcery fiction. The company had published Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories as collections starting in the late 1960s. In the late 1970s, Ace jumped on putting out the twelve volume Conan paperback set. Ace was not a big publisher for lone […]
The First Modern Military Science Fiction Novel
Sunday , 14, June 2015 Book Review, Fiction 2 CommentsBaen Books has a brand new trade paperback anthology entitled The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera. David Drake has an introduction wherein he cites C. L. Moore & Henry Kuttner’s “Clash by Night” (Astounding Science Fiction, March 1943) and Paul Carter’s “The Last Objective” (Astounding Science Fiction, August 1946) as early examples of […]
Astounding Science Fiction changed its name to Analog Science Fact–Fiction with the October 1962 issue. Periodically at a Yahoo Group that I belong, someone will mention how badly Analog deteriorated in the 1960s from it former glory in the 1940s. John W. Campbell as editor of Astounding Stories (later Astounding Science Fiction) starting in 1937 […]
Note: If you have not read the original Hugo-winning The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, by Ursula Le Guin track it down and do so now. It — like this non-canonical sequel — is short: less than four pages. The Ones Who Scourge Omelas Still sickened and silent by their own witness, the children – now […]
May 18 was the beginning of the 450th anniversary of the Siege of Malta (1565). The Siege was one of the great clashes of civilization between Christian Europe and Moslem Asia. The Ottoman Turks had set Islam on the road of conquest again pushing into the Balkans and then into the central Mediterranean Sea. Standing […]
One of my favorite recurring character series in the pulp magazines is the Tizzo the Firebrand by Frederick Faust. Faust (1892-1944) is better known under his pseudonym “Max Brand.” He was one of those high production pulp magazine writers who produced something like 25 million words of prose. He is remembered today as a western […]