Sensor Sweep: Time Machine, Clark Ashton Smith, Jack Vance, Into the Unknown
Monday , 20, March 2023 Sensor Sweep Leave a commentRobert E. Howard (Paperback Warrior): “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” was
written by Robert E. Howard in the early 1930s. The story, featuring Conan the Cimmerian, was originally rejected by Weird Tales, so Howard changed the character to Amra of Akbitana and called the story “The Gods of the North”. It was accepted and published by The Fantasy Fan #7 in March, 1934. As a Conan story, its original, more popular form, “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter”, was published in The Coming of Conan (Gnome Press, 1953) and Conan of Cimmeria (Lancer, 1969). At just 10 paperback pages, it ranks in the top echelon of Conan literature.
Firearms (Spec-Ops Magazine): The Heckler & Koch VP9, known as the SFP9 in Europe and Canada, is a semi-automatic striker-fired handgun that has significantly impacted the firearm industry since its launch in 2014. This pistol’s design incorporates several innovative features, such as its customizable grip, ambidextrous controls, and patented charging supports, making it a versatile and reliable firearm that has gained popularity among law enforcement agencies and civilian shooters. This article will examine the VP9, exploring its history, design, and notable features.
Radio (Tangent): Escape (1947-1954) aired “The Time Machine” on May 9, 1948 as the show’s 40th episode. Not surprisingly, we have aired many episodes (35+) of this top-shelf program over the past 14 years, the last coming in November of 2022. A spinoff and sister show of the highly popular radio program Suspense (1942-62), Escape produced (according to one source) 251 episodes of which 241 were unique stories, plots, or scripts. Escape concentrated on adventure tales, some with an SF/F theme, though the straight adventure tale set in exotic locales was its meat and potatoes. Read More
I have a near love-hate relationship with Louis L’Amour. I took a sledge hammer to his historical novel The Walking Drum a few years back after a re-read. On the other hand, I like his pulp adventures featuring Turk Madden and Ponga Jim Mayo. I find L’Amour works better in slender paperbacks from the 1960s- Last Stand at Papago Wells, Shalako, and Catlow over later sprawling books like Fair Blows the Wind.
I liked the first Sackett novel to be published, The Daybreakers when I read it some years back. L’Amour turned the Sackett family saga into an historical series in the 1970s beginning with Sackett’s Land in 1974 with a turn of the seventeenth century setting. It must have been a trend as the historical Sackett novels started the same year as the recently deceased John Jakes’ Kent Family Chronicles. I read Sackett’s Land around 15 years ago noting some of the problems I saw with The Walking Drum had diminished. Read More
Science Fiction and Fantasy New Releases: 18 March 2023
Saturday , 18, March 2023 Uncategorized Leave a commentEvery week, the Castalia House Blog spotlights some of the many new releases in independent, pulp and web novel-influenced science fiction and fantasy.
Cirsova #14 / Spring 2023 – edited by P. Alexander
Tales of heroic adventure and daring suspense that include:
When an astronaut confronts a lamia, she has a proposition for him: she will refrain from eating children for an entire year…if he will take her into outer space!
Kat is intent on raising an army to reclaim Alness! Can she and Mangos arrange to recruit an elite core of highly trained Fedai in Alomar before her secret gets out?!
A strange woman seemingly miraculously cures a man’s terminal cancer! His son has devoted his life to data sciences, but can he follow the clues to track her down?!
..and more!
How to Win at D&D – Jeffro Johnson
When lockdowns isolated millions of people as they sheltered in place in fear of an apocalyptic plague, Jeffro Johnson did the most obvious thing: he started the most notorious D&D campaign since Greyhawk.
Following a simple rule heuristic of merely doing everything specified by Gary Gygax’s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rule books, no matter how outlandish it was, Jeffro’s gaming group blundered into one revelation after another. Before long it became evident that not only had everyone been playing a game for decades that was fundamentally distinct from the one that Gygax had attempted to convey to people, but the techniques he outlined in the pages of his game manuals were pretty special. They not only opened up pathways to game scenarios that later RPG designers wouldn’t dare dream of, they also gave away the secrets of how to win at RPGs!
Now, for the first time the story of the D&D game and how it was intended to be played can finally be told. Why were the Weapon vs. AC tables included in the Players Handbook? Why can’t you have a meaningful campaign without strict timekeeping? What weird gaming trick did Dave Arneson share with TSR before getting pushed out of the company forever? Answers to all these questions and more are contained within this tome. It won’t just change the way you think about D&D. It will fascinate anyone who has been confounded by role playing previously and enthrall anyone who wants to realize bigger gains at the RPG table.
This is an advance excerpt of Jeffro Johnson’s forthcoming book Winning Secrets.
Perry Rhodan NEO #12 – Alexander Huiskes and Wim Vandermaan
Crest da Zoltral and his companions narrowly escape Tramp only to find themselves clinging to life on a severely damaged ship. When an Arkonide vessel comes to their rescue and takes them to Larsaf III, suspicions surrounding the rescued time travelers increase and they soon find themselves imprisoned as the Methanes attack. Will they survive the historical fall of Atlantis? Or will their journey meet an early end thousands of years before their present?
Meanwhile, Rhodan’s group arrives by stowing away on an alien ship. Their reception is all the more hostile, as they are forced to flee into the forest to avoid robots hunting them down. Driven by a vision Rhodan once had, they strive to find a path from the hemispherical planet’s round side to its strange and implausible flat side.
As secrets abound and IT’s servants play a game of wits with competing agendas, what truths will be revealed about the Planet of Eternal Life, and will the heroes finally be granted the immortality they seek?
The Siege of the Black Citadel (Chuck Dixon’s Conan #1) – Chuck Dixon
The mad emperor Strabonus sits upon the imperial throne of Koth, a danger to his subjects and Koth’s neighbors alike. When his cousin, Prince Xathomidas, raises an army in rebellion, he finds great support within and without the empire. Veteran legionaries, gold, and mercenaries flow into the prince’s camp, including one barbarian sword-for-hire from the frigid North. The towering Black Citadel stands between the rebel prince and the throne he seeks, and when its siege threatens to continue well into winter, the prince orders a small team of sell-swords to find a way into the ancient fortress called Talas K’rith.
But the Black Citadel is guarded by things more terrible than walls and swords.
THE SIEGE OF THE BLACK CITADEL is the first in the new series from The Legend Chuck Dixon, Chuck Dixon’s Conan, which is based on the public domain character of Robert E. Howard’s Conan.
Sensor Sweep: Siege of the Black Citadel, Middle Earth RPG, World of Warcraft
Tuesday , 14, March 2023 Sensor Sweep Leave a commentWeird Tales (Tellers of Weird Tales): The first issue of Weird Tales, dated March 1923, probably arrived on newsstands before that, possibly in mid to late February. I base that only on the idea that magazines usually showed up ahead of their cover dates so as to avoid seeming outdated. For example, Time magazine also started in March 1923. Beginning as a weekly, the first issue was dated March 3. According to Wikipedia–which knows lots of true things but lots of untrue things, too–it was actually put out on February 24.
Sword & Sorcery (Vintage Pop Fiction): Renegade Swords is a sword-and-
sorcery anthology from DMR Press and as usual they’ve come up with an interesting mix of stories. This is a fairly strong collection embracing both conventional sword-and-sorcery stories and stories that either fit into related genres or don’t fit neatly into any genre. Either way it’s highly recommended.
Firearms (Handwaving Freakoutery): It is taken as an obvious given by approximately half of the United States that we are in a massive epidemic of AR-15 homicides, and that something must be done about it. This given is not only completely false, the level of falseness of it is almost incomprehensible. Let’s try and understand exactly how false it is by using simple arithmetic. Read More
I like to read natural history now and then. A favorite book as a kid was William E. Scheele’s The First Mammals. A book I would love to have now but unwilling to pay the going rate.
Prehistoric mammals don’t get the love that dinosaurs do but illustrations of saber-tooth tigers, mammoths, ground sloths etc stir some buried ancestral memory.
Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Reign of the Mammals is a new book that will get you up to speed on prehistoric mammals. This is a companion book to his The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs which I have not read. Read More
Science Fiction and Fantasy New Releases: 11 March 2023
Saturday , 11, March 2023 Uncategorized 1 CommentEvery week, the Castalia House Blog spotlights some of the many new releases in independent, pulp and web novel-influenced science fiction and fantasy.
The Ascendant Wars – Rhett C. Bruno and M. B. Vance
When the rules of war keep changing, fight for each other…
Humanity has been banished to a distant star. Left to fight over resources rationed to them by mysterious machine-overlords known as Wardens.
Commander Rylan Holt labors against inter-colony arms trafficking when an informant gives him horrific news. The ruthless cartel boss, Lilith, has stockpiled outlawed weapons of mass destruction.
Worse, she claims to have permission from the Wardens to unleash them upon the system.
When the battleship Audacity speeds to investigate Rylan’s discovery, operations officer Scott Carrick finds himself in a trap more deadly than he could have ever imagined. His only hope of escape may lie with their most junior crewmember, a nurse named Aila Okuma, who’s never seen battle.
As Rylan, Scott, and Aila struggle to survive a war where the rules keep changing, they must answer a terrible question: how do they win when it seems the Wardens intend for everyone to lose?
Darkening Skies (Path of the Thunderbird Book 1) – eden Hudson
A boy abandoned at an ancient school of warrior arts. A princess bartered away as a treaty bride. A lurking evil with the power to topple the world.
Ji Yu Raijin is happy to live out his life serving his school, cultivating his life force, and learning the Path of Darkening Skies, an ancient and noble warrior art—until the day comes when he has to choose: remain true to the teachings of his path and allow his art to die out or commit an unforgivable sin and save the world.
Second princess Shyong San Koida was born the only cripple in a dynasty of powerful warriors. With a broken life force, the only way Koida can contribute to her family’s empire is by sealing a strategic alliance to a barbarian leader with her hand in marriage. But hidden forces within the court conspire to stop the union and obliterate the Shyong San dynasty at all costs.
At the intersection of the servant boy and the princess’s stories lies a secret, malignant art bent on destroying not only them, but the entire world.
The Earth is Flat – Tanith Lee
IN THOSE DAYS THE EARTH WAS FLAT
In the 1970s and ‘80s, Tanith Lee composed five books’ worth of tales of the Flat Earth, a fantasy series compared to both Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique and The Arabian Nights. In later years she would return to the setting for five more stories. All five are included here, along with many others that showcase Lee’s talent for crafting spellbinding tales of heroic warriors, enigmatic magicians, and strange deities.
Stories included:
“The Origin of Snow”
“The Man Who Stole the Moon”
“The Snake”
“The Pain of Glass”
“I Bring You Forever”
“Foolish, Clever, Wicked and Kind”
“Blue Vase of Ghosts”
“After I Killed Her”
“Cold Spell”
“Beauty is the Beast”
“Into Gold”
“The Truce”
“The God Orkrem”
“The Kingdoms of the Air”
Osprey Publishing’s Celtic Warrior is #30 in the Warrior series. It is a 64 page booklet written by Stephen Allen and illustrations by Wayne Reynolds including 10 color plates.
The book is laid out similar to the Pictish Warrior booklet. Allen has eight pages on introduction and short history of the Celts. Eleven pages are given to the Celtic warrior, culture including feasts, and religious beliefs. Read More
Fantasy (Grognardia): Since this will likely be the last Pulp Fantasy
Gallery post for a while, I thought I’d change things up a bit and go for something a little different this week. Sterling Lanier’s 1973 novel, Hiero’s Journey, is a work of post-apocalyptic science fantasy of which I am very fond. It also enjoys the unique distinction of being mentioned by name in both Gary Gygax’s Appendix N and Tom Wham and Timothy Jones’s foreword to the first edition of Gamma World.
Fantasy (Sprague de Camp Fan): I recently heard about Brandon Sanderson and his $42 million Kickstarter and decided I should read him. I started with his first book: Elantris. Before I start reviewing the book, I want to give some background about the author.
Firearms (Spec Ops Magazine): The MP-443 Grach,
also known as the “PYa” or “Yarygin Pistol,” is the standard military-issue sidearm in Russia. This semi-automatic pistol boasts a high capacity and utilizes a double-action, short-recoil design. The locking mechanism of the barrel and slide follows a simplified Colt-Browning design, which is also present in many other modern pistols like the SIG Sauer and Glock families. Read More
Black Mask magazine is considered to be one of the most influential of pulp magazine along with Weird Tales, Astounding Stories/Science Fiction, and Argosy. All had a profound impact on popular fiction and culture.
Black Mask was the magazine that changed crime-mystery-detective fiction from the locked room to the mean streets. Dashiell Hammett and Carroll John Daly started the hard-boiled transformation in the early 1920s. “Cap” Joseph Shaw remodeled the magazine when he took over as editor in 1926. The magazine cover had “Western, Detective & Adventure Stories” above the title. The first issue with Shaw as editor had a “Captain Kettle” adventure by C. J. Cutliffe-Hyne and also the serial “The Man-Eaters of Tsavo” by J. H. Patterson (?).
Shaw changed the magazine from The Black Mask to Black Mask with the May 1927 issue. The number of western scenes on the covers decreased and crime/gangster covers increased. Shaw encouraged series characters. If you look at the The Crime, Mystery, & Gangster Fiction Magazine Index, you will notice 2/3- ¾ of contents of a late 1920s issue of Black Mask were part of series. Read More
This is a guest post by Deuce Richardson:
Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of Gary Gygax’s death. Obviously, Mr. Gygax was a titanic force in the birth and success of fantasy role-playing games. I, myself, was a D&D gamer and DM during the ’80s and ’90s. However, I was a reader and scholar of SFF/horror before I started gaming and still am now, long after. Thus, it is the literary impact of Gygax that I will examine today. Specifically, Gary’s ‘Appendix N’ from TSR’s Dungeon Master’s Guide (1979).
I read ‘Appendix N’ soon after I began gaming in the ’80s. I remember thinking,”Pretty legit”, or something to that effect. I’d already read The Spell of Conan and The Blade of Conan. Between their covers, they examined most of the books/authors on Gygax’s list or contained essays written by those authors–and far, far more. A few authors were not mentioned. I remember thinking, “Who the hell is John Bellairs?”–but that’s to be expected.
I began to develop some real respect for ‘Appendix N’ in 2009, when I saw how James Maliszewki at Grognardia was using App N to point the OSR guys toward the pulp fiction classics. Then, in 2010-2011, both Grognardia and The Cimmerian blog went on hiatus. I took a break myself, coming back to SFF fandom in 2012. In 2015, I became aware of Jeffro Johnson’s App N posts on the Castalia House blog. Once again, I thought, “You go, Gary.”
Jeffro eventually turned those posts into an honest-to-Crom book by way of Castalia House Press. He made a good argument for ‘Appendix N’ being not just an ‘inspiration’, but as a template from Gygax on how to approach playing/DMing D&D. ‘Appendix N’ was integral to playing D&D as it was originally intended. Jeffro’s book is a landmark work, in my opinion. Read More
Science Fiction and Fantasy New Releases: 4 March 2023
Saturday , 4, March 2023 Uncategorized Leave a commentEvery week, the Castalia House Blog spotlights some of the many new releases in independent, pulp and web novel-influenced science fiction and fantasy.
Apocalypse Tamer 2 – Maxime J. Durland
Invaders have burned down Basil’s home. He’s out for blood.
Now short of a house, Basil and his pets are leaving the countryside for the wider world.
Their goal?
To show the factions vying for control over post-apocalypse Europe that nothing can beat a dragon-riding tamer and his monster menagerie. However, Basil’s crusade soon encounters new challenges.
Who is this mysterious Kalki and his connection to the System? Can they truly defeat their nemesis Apollyon and his allies, the Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Which of the Louvre Pyramid or the Eiffel Tower will prove the best dungeon of them all?
One thing is certain though. No one expects the Apocalypse Tamer.
Endfall (The Kingfall Histories #5) – David Estes
In the east, Sampson, Grym and Charlotte seek to unearth the seventh and final godblade. But to do so, they must overcome the wiles of the magical forest of Echoeswood while facing enemies lurking in every shadow.
In the west, dragonriders Peony and Dane must unite what is left of the fractured nations of Kingfall, but a surprise visitor has the potential to destroy what small measure of peace the bondmates have managed to restore to Travail.
In the north, Rose must come to terms with her own undeadness while facing demons no living human has ever faced.
In the south, Ando and his merry band of misfits journey the Loslandian wilderness in search of their purpose, a purpose that destiny always knew would lead them back to Kingfall. But will they arrive in time with their entire crew intact?
And all the while, the enemy draws closer, the creatures known as the Thousands drawn by the scent of human blood and the promise of chaos. If they reach Kingfall’s shores, gods save us all.
Light Unto Another World: Volume 6 – Yakov Merkin
The war between Fulnar and the elf/demi-human alliance is only continuing to escalate in the wake of a massive blow to the human kingdom’s objects of worship, with Uriel Makkis, and his friends, caught squarely in the middle of it all.
Now, both galvanized to continue the fight against the growing demi-human strength in particular, and still reeling from blows it has taken, Fulnar is starting to call on every powerful force at its disposal, no matter how vile.
It’ll be up to Uriel and his team, some of whom have pasts intertwined with these new foes, to prevent them from turning the tide of the war.
But at what cost?
Uriel and his friends will find themselves tested as never before, as they pit their newfound strength against the might of foes who will do anything to destroy them.
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Affectionately known as the Twain, these rogues are two of the most legendary characters in all of fantasy.
While R. E. Howard, C. L. Moore, and Clark Ashton Smith laid the foundation for sword and sorcery in Weird Tales, Fritz Leiber codified the genre with the first appearance of his adventurers in “Two Sought Adventure”. Since then, sword and sorcery has often followed the adventures of a pair of contrasting rogues in colorful adventures. Leiber would write over thirty stories featuring the civilization-infatuated barbarian and the magically inclined thief.
Now Goodman Games’ sword and sorcery magazine, Tales from the Magician’s Skull, has published the first new adventure in over 20 years, authorized by Leiber’s estate—”Guilty Creatures.”
As this is the age of the remake and of the skinsuit imposter, the reader may have some trepidation over placing one of fantasy’s treasures into another writer’s hands. Said writer is Nathan Long, however, a veteran of the sword and sorcery scene, having written five novels for the Black Library’s beloved Gotrek and Felix series, a grimdark take on Leiber’s formula.
And with that, the stage is set.
Literally. Read More