Blog Archives
sSensor Sweep: Emil Petaja, Battle of Hastings, Polish Legions, and Pirates
Monday , 5, February 2018 Sensor Sweep Leave a commentFiction (DMR Books): “ ‘Swords of the Red Brotherhood’ appears to take place before “Black Vulmea’s Vengeance.” It’s essentially the same story as the Conan yarn “The Black Stranger”, recycled with a different protagonist. In both stories, a tainted noble with a relentless enemy has fled to a distant, savage coast and hidden there, until […]
Sensor Sweep: Materialism, Le Guin, New Sun, and Rokugan
Monday , 29, January 2018 Sensor Sweep 1 CommentFiction (Tellers of Weird Tales): “Lovecraft aside, weird fiction is a warning against materialism, for it is a genre that lives in a pre-science, pre-Enlightenment age, one in which magic and supernatural monsters are still possible. Its materialist characters are science-minded, working in physics, chemistry, medicine, and so on. The materialist himself is arrogant, superior, sure of himself […]
Sensor Sweep: A. Merritt, Dungeons & Dragons, Monster Manuals, and the Murder of Sword and Sorcery
Monday , 22, January 2018 Sensor Sweep 10 CommentsWriters (On an Underwood No. 5): :Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian wandered into the pages of Weird Tales with “The Phoenix on the Sword” (Dec 1932), and was followed by “The Scarlet Citadel” (Jan 1933), “The Tower of the Elephant” (Mar), “Black Colossus” (Jun), “The Slithering Shadow” (Sep), “The Pool of the Black One” (Oct), “Rogues […]
Sensor Sweep: Maal Dweb, Beastmaster, Federation & Empire, and John Carter RPG
Monday , 15, January 2018 Sensor Sweep 4 CommentsWriters (DMR Books): “This date marks the one hundred twenty-fifth anniversary of the birth of Clark Ashton Smith. Readers of this site should require no introduction, as Smith was one of the “big three” writers for Weird Tales, along with Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. It only seems appropriate that we should honor this […]
Sensor Sweep: Elfland’s Daughter, Magic the Gathering, Dell Horror, and Last Jedi (again).
Monday , 8, January 2018 Sensor Sweep 1 CommentFiction (Pulp Rev): “He is not wrong. This is the Second Coming of the Pulps. The difference is that the hustle is even harder now than it was the first time around, both in competing attracts and in the scope and scale of the playing field (truly global). The role of the pulp magazine in […]
Sensor Sweep: Zylarthen, Thrilling Western, and Elf-Quest
Monday , 1, January 2018 Sensor Sweep 5 CommentsGames (Save Versus All Wands): “Every week I google “zylarthen” to see if anyone has written a new review or whatever of Seven Voyages of Zylarthen, my OD&D neo-clone. After I gave the game it’s somewhat distinctive name, I quickly discovered that one of the benefits is that it’s pretty easy to google using just […]
Sensor Sweep: Conan pastiches, Crashing Suns, and lots of Star Wars
Monday , 25, December 2017 Sensor Sweep 5 CommentsWriters (Williamette Week): You may have heard that Portland’s famous goth bar, The Lovecraft, is under new ownership after the previous owner, Jon Horrid was accused of assault. Now that the bar has changed hands, questions arose whether the new owner planned on continuing to call the bar after an author known for racism and anti-semitism, […]
Sensor Sweep: Lin Carter Children’s Fantasy, SPI, Kaluta, and Blood of Elves
Monday , 11, December 2017 Sensor Sweep 10 CommentsFiction (Tolkien and Fantasy): “Fantasiae was, according to its initial subtitle, the “monthly newsletter of the Fantasy Association,” based out of Los Angeles. The first issue was dated April 1973, and the final issue was no. 103 (volume 9 no. 10) from October 1981. The editor for the entire run was Ian M. Slater, who also […]
Sensor Sweep: Dungeon Dwellers, Shambleau, Dumb Barbarians
Monday , 4, December 2017 Sensor Sweep 6 CommentsRPG (Blackgate.com): I’m still unpacking the boxes I brought home from the Fall 2017 Games Plus auction. There’s so many SF and fantasy board games being published these days that it’s impossible to keep up. But you know, I do my best. A week after the auction, I dropped by Games Plus in Mount Prospect […]
Sensor Sweep: Lin Carter, Tolkien, and Modiphius Conan
Monday , 27, November 2017 Sensor Sweep 8 CommentsFiction (Tolkien and Fantasy blog): “The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, which published some 70-odd books from 1969-1974, is justly renowned, and Lin Carter (1930-1988) is often acclaimed as the editor of the series, but he was not the editor. Look at the footer of every single one of his introductions to books in the series: […]
Sensor Sweep: Demons, Gangsters, and Squirt Heroes
Monday , 20, November 2017 Sensor Sweep 8 CommentsFiction (Tellers of Weird Tales): “In “The City on the Edge of Forever,” a man travels through a time-portal (located in the ruins of a city on a faraway planet) and unwittingly alters the past, thus altering the future: nothing that he knew came to be and his fellow space-travelers are stranded in time and […]