Blog Archives

Appendix N (Save Versus All Wands) Top Ten Reasons Why I Hate Drow  — “Ideally, all elves should be dangerous, mysterious and perhaps even somewhat creepy. Creating a new category of elves that are almost defined as such, effectively means that elves in general (all the other elves) will not be dangerous, mysterious and somewhat […]

Books (Glorious Trash) After the Good War — “One of the joys of any trash fiction fanatic is scouring the mass market paperback racks at the local second-hand books emporium. I’ve made countless discoveries of heretofore-forgotten novels this way, and this book, first published in hardcover in 1972 and released by Popular Library with a […]

Appendix N (The Arts Mechanical) Jim Baen And SF — “All that’s available in print and media Is stuff based on the same old tropes. It’s cookie cutter SFF without knowing the right recipes. Let alone what it takes to make a new recipe. All that’s left is rewinding the same old tropes. That’s been […]

Appendix N (Zak S.) Lovecraft, Nerds And The Uses of Ick — “These sheltered, life-phobic souls: shy, nervous, fragile, conflict-averse, fastidious, introverted bookworms, whose main social outlet is nerd conventions, with their small circle of gentle hobbyist correspondents are, ironically, imitating Lovecraft because they haven’t read Lovecraft, or haven’t learned anything from reading him. They aren’t […]

Appendix N (MPRNews) Frodo, Bilbo, Kullervo: Tolkien’s Finnish adventure — “Those expecting a typical Tolkien story will be unsettled by Kullervo: He is physically ugly, angry, destructive and uncontrollable. Raised as a prisoner of his father’s murderer, Kullervo survives all attempts to kill him and ruins every task he is given. Sold into slavery and mistreated by […]

Books (The Mantle) Viewing Narnia through a Hindu Lens — “I do not imply that Hindu readers will ‘get’ any messages such as I have described from reading the Narnia books. They won’t any more than Christian readers will always spot the Christian symbolism. Books that sermonize are generally not enjoyed. The story is everything — […]

Games (Grant Dalgliesh) The Original Star Wars — “In 1977, Columbia Games, then known as Gamma Two Games, published a strategy game called ‘Starwars’. This game had no connection to the movie Starwars, but was a simple space strategy game for 2-4 players that involved exploration and conquest of six star systems. The game was published […]

Comics (Comics Review) Dagar the Invincible: Tales of Sword and Sorcery: Volume 1 — “Dagar is something of a ‘kitchen sink’ book – as in ‘everything but the kitchen sink.’ In the nine issues collected in this volume, Dagar encounters wizards, dinosaurs, cave men, werewolves, vampires, dark gods, demons and pirates, along with assorted beautiful […]

Magazines (Pulpfest 2016) The AMAZING Story: The Fifties — Dream Worlds — “One noticeable feature of all the best stories from this period is that they are scarcely science fiction at all, but convey a deeper mood of the fantastic or the unnerving, bringing a more adult feel to the treatments of their themes. They […]

Appendix N (Pulpfest 2016) ARGOSY at PulpFest — An Abundance of Riches — “Bean’s novel — the first published fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs — would introduce John Carter of Mars to readers. It would soon be followed by the author’s ‘Tarzan of the Apes,’ published in its entirety in the October 1912 issue of THE ALL-STORY. […]

Pink Slime Watch (Black Gate) Despair All The Way Down: The Illearth War by Stephen R. Donaldson — “The Illearth War is a story steeped in existential dread. Both inaction and action in the face of soul-crushing evil seem to lead to disastrous ends. To believe or not to believe? To fight or not to fight? […]

Immensely Sad (The Chronicle of Higher Education) Prominent Medieval Scholar’s Blog on ‘Feminist Fog’ Sparks an Uproar — “It’s too easy to take his blog and point out everything that is wrong with it and label him a misogynist and walk away from it like it is a car wreck. He was symptomatic of a […]