Blog Archives

The second book in the Brutal Trilogy, James Alderdice returns with to the troubled reign of King Gathelaus with Fierce.  The first novel in the trilogy, Brutal, was reviewed here on this very blog last August.  This review necessarily contains spoilers for the first novel, so if you’re the type to react volubly at spoilers for […]

The second installment of Gulf by Robert Heinlein appeared in the December 1949 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. It can be read here at Archive.org.  Robert Heinlein’s Spy-Fi thriller, Gulf, showed so much promise before sinking into the Campbellian morass of dull thinkery. Whereas Part 1 featured covert cat & mouse action, high stakes interrogation, and a […]

It has become common around certain parts of the Castalia House blog to blame John Campbell and his clique of writers for many of the long-standing evils affecting the genre of science fiction. But as the crazy years of the 1970s showed, Campbell has no monopoly on the ruin of the genre. He wasn’t even the first […]

The release this past week of Amazon’s Original series, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan represent a rarity among Hollywood media.  The titular character – Jack Ryan, that is, not Tom Clancy – starts as Jack Ryan typically does as an analyst whose deductive powers put him in the center of a globe-hopping adventure and force him to […]

Reversion by M.C. Pease appeared in the December 1949 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. It can be read here at Archive.org We’re back to Bad Astounding with this one. One step removed from the Dialogues, in which multiple eggheads discuss their thinks, is the Monologue, in which one egghead goes on at length on a subject. […]

Dark Legion Comics is pleased to announce the release of the digital edition of Gun Ghoul #2 by Will Caligan. In their search for the mysterious killer who is wreaking havoc on the crime lords of Chicago, Agent Justice of the FBI and Detective Callahan of the Chicago Police Department recreate a gun battle that took place […]

Clark Ashton Smith was not only one of the three pillars of Weird Tales, but a key writer in the American tradition of fantasy that brought forth H.P. Lovecraft. Thanks to Campbell’s Unknown and the explosion of Tolkien copycats, this American tradition of weird fantasy has been relegated to pastiche and parody. Smith’s “The Abominations of Yondo”, his first […]

Arkhaven has not been standing pat despite a few unexpected curve balls slowing it down. The answer to last week’s oft-heard question, “when will Alt-Hero #3 be available on the Arkhaven Direct store?” turns out to be “today”. We had a bizarre problem where entering the ISBN number to load the book into our inventory […]

QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted #3: A Secret Love is now available on Kindle and KU. Chief Warrant Officer Graven Tower is a ruggedly handsome military policeman who hates aliens. Fortunately, as a member of His Grace’s Military Crimes Investigation Division – Xenocriminology and Alien Relations, he gets to arrest a lot of them. Sometimes he […]

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