Blog Archives

There is a new live action movie, The Legend of Tarzan. I caught the attention deficit trailer a few months back, which repelled me. It had the whiff of 300 about it (a movie I despise). Some positive responses by friends of mine convinced me to take the kids to go see it. Edgar Rice […]

One thing I don’t think we’ve actually done since SuperversiveSF began partnering with Castalia is actually articulate in a concise way what our deal is. I’ve mentioned our mandates: Good storytelling, heroic characters, and a sense of wonder. There’s a certain tone we’re looking for in our fiction, a certain sense of something greater, usually […]

In the previous issue, the editorial staff of Planet Stories put it to the readers whether or not to ax the Letters section. Given that sentiment regarding the Vizigraph typically ranges from it being a worthless waste of space to the only part of Planet Stories worth reading, there are strong arguments both for and against […]

The third Ghostbusters movie is out (confusingly named Ghostbusters – In what I believe is a cinematic first: a science fiction series reboot with the identical name as its original cinematic inspiration.) Despite a massive marketing budget, a passionate built-in franchise fanbase, and a massive amount of additional free media publicity due to crafty hot-button pushing […]

William R. Forstchen’s One Second After is the scariest book I have ever read. No horror novel ever came close to shaking me up like Forstchen’s tale of an electro-magnatic pulse (EMP) attack on the United States by terrorists. One Second After chronicles what happens when three nuclear bombs are exploded above the atmosphere. The […]

One of the many things I noticed in this issue was the significantly larger portion of the magazine dedicated to adspace. While the earlier issues I’d read had a few ads in them, your typical Charles Atlas plugs, build your own radio kits, and some various household gadgets, the issue I finished had several pages […]

  The Wheel Is Death by Roger Dee appeared in the Fall 1949 issue of Planet Stories. More like “The Twist is Obvious”. This is the only thing I’ve read in Planet Stories that I would say was terrible.  The Wheel Is Death is an incredibly short story (barely over two pages) that spends the […]

Signal Red by Henry Guth appeared in the Fall 1949 issue of Planet Stories. Signal Red is not a bad story; it’s just, much like the other stories I’ve read in this issue, not what I’d gotten used to from Planet Stories from just a few years earlier. Humanity has outposts and travel throughout the […]