Blog Archives

Spend enough time reading science fiction, and readers will come across the idea of the Big Three of classic science fiction. Always a controversial selection, as the list of worthy grandmasters of the genre exceeds the places available in any Big Three, the current consensus is that Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein […]

Last week marked the end of an era for the Castalia House blog. Alex said farewell after almost three and a half solid years of weekly blog entries. He provided a service reviewing an older piece of (generally) pulp science fiction. Planet Stories was a favored magazine for him to discuss, a magazine often hated […]

Where to even begin? It’s been a tremendous privilege and an honor to have been a part of the Castalia House family. Over the course of around three years, I’ve written somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 Short Reviews, Retro Fandom Fridays, and miscellany in an effort to give people an idea of what the […]

This is it, the final Retro Fandom Friday for some time! People were abuzz in the Vizigraph about the Fall issue of Planet Stories, which featured Enchantress of Venus as its cover story. I totally did not plan for this to fall on the day that our Illustrated 70th Anniversary Edition of Enchantress of Venus […]

Last fall Fenton Woods dropped an unheralded work of brilliance on the literary world with which teased us with Pirates of the Electromagnetic Airwaves (previously reviewed at CH) the subtitle Yankee Republic Book #1.  The series continues in the recently released Book #2, Five Million Watts, in which Fenton Woods pulls the curtain a little further back on […]

Sword of Fire, by Emmett McDowell, was the featured cover story of the Winter 1949 issue of Planet Stories. It can be read here at Archive.org. At last we get to the exciting cover story of the Winter issue! Dashing raygun pulp hero Jupiter Jones is on a mission for the Galactic Colonization Board to […]

This week had me slammed, but we promise that next week, we’ll have a review up for Emmett McDowell’s Sword of Fire!

Let The Ants Try by Frederik Pohl (as James MacCreigh) appeared in the Winter 1949 issue of Planet Stories. It can be read here at Archive.org. A man’s first enemy is his family—for he sees them first—but he sides with them against the families across the way. And still his neighbors are allies against the […]