Blog Archives

Science Fiction (Cryptofictional Records Wing): This trend started out in 1871 with Sir George Chesney’s “The Battle of Dorking”, a novella in which England is invaded by a fictional (but German-speaking) country assisted by some form of secret technology. Due to this story’s popularity with readers, other British invasion thrillers soon followed. However, while these […]

Publishing (Goodman Games): The Skull and his various minions, flunkies, lieutenants, and, yes, even interns would like to send a hearty congratulations to our sword-brothers over at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, on the occasion of their 50th issue! Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is an online magazine specializing in adventure fantasy of all kinds, from eponymous tales of […]

Comic Books (Post Cards from the Age of Reason): How do we get comics get into our hands? These are a few brief opening thoughts on comic book distribution. I will return to the topic in a later post. Much like Pulp Magazines, comic books started out their existence as print matter distributed by the […]

Review (Easily Distracted): There are Victorian tales here; there are contemporary tales; there are near-future tales, in which the very prescient threat of environmental collapse lurks in the background. There are supernatural and non-supernatural stories; there are stories of ancient magic and dark mysticism; there are stories that defy categorization. Writing (Alexander Hellene): He spots […]

New/Art (Lulu): This book is a collection of articles about the early history of the art and the illustrators who made the works of Robert E. Howard come to life. Contents include: A heavily illustrated article on some of the best artists who worked for Weird Tales by Frank Coffman. A look at Roy G. […]

Gaming (Game Spot): Activision Blizzard’s stock price started the day on Wednesday, November 3, down by more than 14% on the New York Stock Exchange following an earnings release on Tuesday where the company announced delays for Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV and made other announcements that might have spooked investors. Activision Blizzard posted revenue […]

Fiction (Withnail Books): In the mid-1930s F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, wrote a short story set in medieval France, with a lead character, ‘The Count of Darkness’, based on the young Ernest Hemingway. It also featured a witch cult, drawn from a research source which greatly inspired the work of H.P. Lovecraft. […]

Fantasy (Ken Lizzi): I’ve written about Roger Zelazny before in my sporadic Appendix N series of posts. My recent reading of the entirety of the Dilvish the Damned sequence of tales requires that I add this supplemental. Because Dilvish is worthy of the effort. Now, the culmination of Dilvish’s saga (The Changing Land, 1981) postdates […]

Books (Talking Covers): Editor Gary Fisketjon launched Vintage Contemporaries, a paperback imprint of Random House, in September 1984. There were seven initial titles. By decade’s end, there would be close to 100. The line was a mix of reprints and originals, and nearly thirty years later the checklist found in the back of the books […]

T.V. (Arkhaven Comics): If Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert had had a baby it would look like Apple TV’s Foundation…No, that isn’t it.  How about, if Apple TV’s programming chief wanted to buy Dune and it wasn’t available it would look like Apple TV’s Foundation?  Yeah, that’s the ticket. Foundation by Isaac Asimov is one of the […]