Blog Archives

Star Trek (The Companion): If you make Kirk a sea captain and turn the snow-caked planet of Exo III into the Antarctic then the hunt for a lost expedition feared dead, but in fact, transformed by their findings subterranean city of a long-forgotten alien race, then it’s basically a sequel to H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains […]

Conventions (PC Gamer): Carmack heads the list of “guests” at the upcoming event that bill itself as a sci-fi convention for people “tired of woke propaganda.” Id Software co-founder and former Oculus VR CTO John Carmack is facing criticism for his recent announcement that he will be attending BasedCon, a sci-fi and fantasy convention for […]

D&D (Gronardia): In the interests of narrowing the scope of potential candidates for this list, I established a few rules for myself. First and most importantly, I would only select from monsters unique to Dungeons & Dragons. That means, mythological or folkloric monsters, like minotaurs or goblins, were excluded from consideration, even in cases where D&D’s version of […]

Conan (Essential Malady): From this alone we can establish that both the publisher and the author are embarrassed by (or dislike) the source material. It is not clear who wrote the Afterword so I will assume this is a shared opinion. It would have been more honest to put this in the Foreword so a […]

Comic Books (Bounding Into Comics): Heroic Signatures President Fredrik Malmberg recently explained why he chose to make a deal with Titan Comics to publish new Conan the Barbarian stories despite receiving multiple requests from other publishers. Conan (Paperback Warrior): John Maddox Roberts is a Vietnam War veteran that served in the US Army from 1967 until 1970. […]

Fiction (Books of Brilliance): The novels are filled with violence, crime, and a lot of blood. And that is not everyone’s cup of tea. The protagonist is usually a detective that takes on a case that is a lot more complicated than when it first appears. Under the tutelage of the right author, the story is hard […]

Conan (Essential Malady): Conan is a hired mercenary working for the rogue prince Xathomidas to overthrow King Strabonus of Koth. These two characters are only mentioned as background to the narrative and Conan is mainly taking orders from General Scythis; usually through his captain Danix, who is charge of the mercenaries. Dixon sets this all […]

Fiction (Sprague de Camp Fan): The Weird Tales Story by Robert Weinberg has seen three different editions. The first was published by Fax Collector’s Editions in 1977. This was a nice hardcover book with interior art by Alex Nino. The book is dedicated: To Margaret Brundage, whose covers might not have reflected the contents of Weird Tales but […]

Sword & Sorcery (Sprague de Camp Fan): When L. Sprague de Camp first got the idea to compile a Sword and Sorcery anthology, he had trouble finding a publisher. More on this later. First a little (a very short) history is needed. Cinema (Roger Ebert): It is by general agreement the most famous shot in […]

Robert E. Howard (Paperback Warrior): “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” was written by Robert E. Howard in the early 1930s. The story, featuring Conan the Cimmerian, was originally rejected by Weird Tales, so Howard changed the character to Amra of Akbitana and called the story “The Gods of the North”. It was accepted and published by The Fantasy Fan #7 in March, 1934. As a Conan story, […]

Weird Tales (Tellers of Weird Tales): The first issue of Weird Tales, dated March 1923, probably arrived on newsstands before that, possibly in mid to late February. I base that only on the idea that magazines usually showed up ahead of their cover dates so as to avoid seeming outdated. For example, Time magazine also […]