Blog Archives
sShort Reviews – The Return of Hastur, by August Derleth
Friday , 30, June 2017 Uncategorized 13 CommentsThe Return of Hastur, by August Derleth, appeared in the March 1939 issue of Weird Tales. You really shouldn’t read it, but if you must, it can be found here with other, much better, stories at Luminist.org. Going into The Return of Hastur, I was certain that August Derleth was going to be pretty bad […]
Classic Traveller: Scout Ship Economics
Thursday , 29, June 2017 Games, Tabletop Games, Traveller, Uncategorized 4 CommentsThe Traveller role playing game is named Traveller because characters tend to be people at loose ends bumming around the galaxy. Large chunks of the game mechanics revolve around the mechanisms of, well, travelling — including how to pay for all that travel. Unless a character is lucky enough to get drafted into a service […]
There was a time in the 1970s when Frank Frazetta retreated as the preeminent painter of fantasy paperback book covers but before the rise of Ken Kelly, Boris Vallejo, and Rowena. This was a time of Frazetta imitators. Among those were Spanish artists brought in by Warren Magazines. One of those was Enrique Torres. He […]
Short Reviews – The House Where Time Stood Still, by Seabury Quinn
Friday , 23, June 2017 Uncategorized 10 CommentsThe House Where Time Stood Still by Seabury Quinn appeared in the March 1939 issue of Weird Tales. A scanned pdf of this issue can be found here at Luminist.org. I’m sure that if I had the time and money to delve deeper into Weird Tales, I’d find myself wondering why and pontificating on the injustice […]
The greatest argument for reading much and reading widely is the chance to see sides of things that were invisible to the authors – if only by virtue of having a completely different perspective.[1] An excellent example of this is this article by Vishwas R. Gaitonde on viewing Narnia through a Hindu lens. Gaitonde takes us on […]
It turns out that Rocket’s Red Glare is NOT an exclusively American themed collection. A few of the stories fit that theme, but now that the number has dipped below .500, I’m forced to conclude that the unabashedly pro-US position in some of the stories is the icing and not the cake. Which is fine […]
The psychedelic era of rock music had a distinctive look for album covers. That artistic style spilled over into mass paperback book covers. One could argue that Charles Moll was the most psychedelic artist for sword and sorcery fiction paperbacks. There is nothing out there on Charles Moll. He painted covers for paperback books in […]
The Swine of Aeaea by Clifford Ball was the featured cover story of the March 1939 issue of Weird Tales. A scanned pdf of this issue can be found here at Luminist.org. The Swine of Aeaea was probably the best story I’ve read for Short Reviews since Leigh Brackett’s the Moon that Vanished. Like Brackett’s story, The […]
Classic Traveller: Freetrader Economics
Thursday , 15, June 2017 Games, Tabletop Games, Traveller, Uncategorized 31 CommentsIn two posts I’ve outlined my Classic Traveller setting: first by rolling up an entirely random subsector and secondly by musing on the nature of one of the polities with a focus on its capital and its location within the polity it leads. The capital of the Empire of Reason is the Ladfaus system which […]
Some stories are just so good, you want people to be able to read them without any preconceived notions of what they are about or why they are noteworthy. Here are several of that sort: “The True History of the Hare and the Tortoise” by Lord Dunsany “Memory” by H. P. Lovecraft “Nightmare In Yellow” […]
Rocket’s Red Glare – Double Stuff Short Reviews
Wednesday , 14, June 2017 Short Fiction, Uncategorized 5 CommentsFreeman’s Stand, by Sarah A. Hoyt, brings the theme of Rocket’s Red Glare back to the forefront with a vengeance. Molly is a teenaged girl who is literally a rebellious teenager. She has joined a loose organization dedicated to overthrowing a vaguely defined despotic regime with the goal of implementing an equally vaguely defined New […]
Roy Krenkel (1918-1983) is an artist primarily associated with Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks. He attended Burne Hogarth’s classes at the School of Visual Arts. He did work with Al Williamson and Frank Frazetta for EC Comics in the early 1950s. Krenkel also drew interior art in the waning days of the pulp magazine for Marvel […]