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John Brunner has written some books I like a lot: Interstellar Empire, Secret Agent of Terra, The Repairmen of Cyclops, The Traveller in Black etc. I have had Time Without Number on my shelf for longer than I should admit. It was time to read it. I have the 1969 paperback edition. It is made […]

I wrote an entry “Whither Weird Tales?” back in November 2015. At the time it had been a year and a half since the last issue of the magazine had appeared. The magazine was reanimated in 2019 with Jonathan Maberry as editor. Five issues of Weird Tales have been published since then. Issue #366 came […]

The April 1957 issue of Science Fiction Adventures had a sensational red cover by Ed Emsh. The three novellas format continued. “Clansmen of Fear” by Henry Hasse was the cover story. This is a post-apocalyptic story as was so common in 1950s science fiction magazines. Hasse is probably best remembered for the story “He Who […]

Every two years, a new Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly volume is out. I reviewed Volume 1 in 2016, Volume II in 2018. The Best of Heroic Fantasy III covers 2013-2015. Format is trade paperback. Cover is classic sword and sorcery by Robert Zoltan, 289 pages of text with a few end pages on Kickstarter […]

We are in the middle of a small press fiction golden age – Weirdbook, Tales from the Magician’s Skull, Storyhack, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly come to mind. It reminds me of the old D.I.Y. attitude in punk and alternative music in the late 1970s though the 80s. It is hard to believe that I reviewed the […]

One of the great science fiction adventure anthologies is Donald A. Wollheim’s Swordsmen in the Sky. This is a near perfect anthology in terms of theme, contents, and presentation. An Ace Books paperback from 1964, it sold for $.60. Four novelettes and one story written by classic science fiction writers. Of course, the cover by […]

        L. Sprague de Camp was part of the small second wave of sword and sorcery fiction from the early 1950s that included Poul Anderson and Jack Vance. He used to include himself as a pioneer of the genre in the introductions to the Lancer Books Conan paperbacks citing his Harold Shea […]

             The concept of imaging past lives, reincarnation, wandering egos has been an idea going back over a century in fiction.                 H. Rider Haggard had the idea of past loves in She (1886). He returned with variations of the idea in The […]

Last fall, I had mentioned a story set in Ireland where a rascal of a man has the table turned on him. I had thought it was E. F. Benson, but the story premise just did not feel like a Benson story. It is unusual for me to forget the author and or title of […]

It turns out there was a second E. E. Smith working in the field of speculative science-fiction back in the day. In addition to Doc EE Smith, one of the original Big Three of science fiction, a woman by the name of Evelyn E. Smith made frequent contributions to Galaxy Magazine.  A crossword puzzle compiler […]

Three years ago, I wrote about the magazine Weird Tales having no issues the previous year and a half. It appears that Weird Tales is dead. After I posted that blog post, I had heard that editor Marvin Kaye was trying to get money together for a new issue. I have not heard a word […]

I first read of Nictzin Dyalhis in L. Sprague de Camp’s Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers in the chapter “Conan’s Compeers.” I already knew of Clifford Ball having read “The Thief of Forthe” in very first (coverless) issue of Weird Tales I ever bought. From de Camp, I learned of Nictzin Dyalhis and Norvell Page. By […]