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sThe Metal Chamber by Duane W. Rimel appeared in the March 1939 issue of Weird Tales. A scanned pdf of this issue can be found here at Luminist.org. The Metal Chamber is small and claustrophobic piece written largely in the form of a suicide note from a biologist who dabbled in telepathy and found himself […]
This is not the Fritz Leiber you’re looking for.[1] Apparently, Fritz Leiber Jr. – born December 24, 1910[2] – is an unknown science fiction author among modern readers, at least according to this io9 article from several years ago. Seriously? Noted contemporary Poul Anderson was quoted as having said that in the late 30s and […]
This post has nothing whatsoever to do with SF/F. But if you’ll bear with me for a moment … I’ve always had a vague distaste for the genre officially known as “folk music.” But it didn’t turn into active dislike until a local radio DJ asked me to transfer an old reel-to-reel tape labeled “Woody […]
As detailed last week, the first pair of stories in Rough Edges Press featured unapologetically pro-American science-fiction. The unexpected pro-American subtext provided a breath of fresh air to anyone suffocating under the weight of the current trend of nihilistic and globalist claptrap infesting the genre. Unfortunately, the next pair of stories in the collection failed to continue the […]
Jim Steranko (born 1938) had a brief career as a painter for sword and sorcery paperbacks in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He came out of the comic book milieu like Frank Frazetta and Gray Morrow. Steranko had started work with Marvel Comics in 1966. In 1969, he had a falling out with Stan […]
Short Reviews will return next week with Duane Rimel’s “The Metal Chamber” in the March 1939 issue of Weird Tales! Cirsova Heroic Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine is now open for and accepting submissions! Details can be found here, but suffice it to say that we are looking for action-packed and exciting stories of daring […]
In my last post I was gearing up for a Classic Traveller Campaign by rolling up a Subsector and trusting to the fate of the dice. In that post I defined the basic layout of the Subsector Narzenia and the polities within it. Now, I focus a bit more on the largest political grouping in the […]
In a recent article, Castalia House writer Benjamin Cheah lays down the conventions of isekai fiction, a popular pulp-influenced genre from Japan. Isekai is alternate world fantasy, where characters from the present are spirited away to another world. Cheah describes it as follows: Fantasy writers need to solve two problems. They need to create a believable […]
Regular readers of this blog are certainly familiar with the creeping sense of realization one frequently encounters when reading works written after 1940. Who among us hadn’t become all too familiar with the bait-and-switch tactic used to sell expressly anti-western civilizational works of fantasy and science fiction to an unsuspecting public? It is one of […]
Sandford (Sandy) Kossin (born 1926) is a general illustrator producing many paperback covers and movie posters from the 1950s through the 1970s. He painted some science fiction paperbacks from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. For a brief time, he was the house artist for Signet/New American Library line of sword and sorcery novels […]
Short Reviews – Referent, by Ray Bradbury (as Brett Sterling)
Friday , 26, May 2017 Uncategorized 5 CommentsReferent, by Ray Bradbury writing under the shared pseud Brett Sterling, appeared in the October 1948 Issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. The October 1948 issue ends on a bizarre note with another Ray Bradbury short (this time under the pseud Brett Sterling). Referent features a boy in a sort of educational crèche colony; some sort […]
Cast your mind back to the late 1930s, a world in transition: The world was finally emerging from a crushing depression, Europe was in turmoil following the Great War and a series of socialist and other revolutions, Hitler’s Germany was on the rise, having successfully annexed both Austria and Czechoslovakia while the great powers dithered, […]