Fiction (Black Gate): I heard about Charles Nuetzel, who’d written some Howard-like and Burroughs-like tales. I’d stumbled on his book called Warriors of Noomas. After a search on the net, I found an email address and sent one flying into the void. I wasn’t sure he was even alive, but he answered and we became frequent correspondents and friends. He too was a huge fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs and quite a bit of his writing was ERB inspired. He’d become a pulp writer and book packager for Powell Publications.

Edgar Rice Burroughs (Arkhaven Substack): A few decades back, if you went to Waldenbooks or B. Dalton Bookseller at your local mall, the science fiction section would have a sizeable Edgar Rice Burroughs section. Ace Books had the Carson of Venus and Pellucidar series, and various stand alone novels generally with Frank Frazetta covers. Ballantine Books kept the Tarzan and John Carter/Mars/Barsoom series in print with Boris Vallejo and Neal Adams covers for Tarzan and Michael Whelan covers for John Carter of Mars series.

Tolkien (Malcolm Guite): We look together at the evolution of one of the most beautiful poems in the Lord of the Rings

Robert E. Howard (Sprague de Camp Fan): Glenn Lord’s The Last Celt: A Bio-Bibliography of Robert Ervin Howard (1976) is a foundational and unique contribution to Howard studies. Lord was not only a biographer but also the primary literary executor of Howard’s legacy for decades, and his work blends elements of biography, bibliography, archive, and homage. It is not a conventional biography, but its impact on every other work about Howard—including the bios by Finn, Vick, and Oliver—is profound.

Star Trek (Fandom Pulse): This was a weird episode, and I give my full review here in our vide of the day!

Comic Books (CBR): Per a press release from Titan Comics, this October will be a major month for Conan the Barbarian thanks to two landmark releases. The first comes in the form of Conan the Barbarian #25, set to arrive in stores on October 8, which will serve as an oversized one-shot featuring a main story from series writer Jim Zub and critically-acclaimed fantasy artist Alex Horley

Conventions (Black Gate): I’m on my way to Howard Days 2025, the two-day celebration of the life and work of the godfather of sword-and-sorcery himself, Robert E. Howard. It’s been mecca for his fans and successors for almost four decades, and every sword-and-sorcery devotee I know hopes to make pilgrimage at least once.

Weird Tales (Tellers of Weird Tales): As I have been going through the issues published in 1925, I have noticed a recurring word: rays. I figured I had better make a search for that word and related words and concepts. Radio was big and new in the 1920s. Radium and radioactivity were in the news and in our culture, too. (Radium was discovered in 1898, X-rays in 1896).

Cinema (Nerdrotic): The Fantastic Four: First Steps is indeed the best Disney Marvel film of the year and the Female Silver Surfer is still dumb.

Fiction (Isegoria): The most relevant aspect of Neal Stephenson‘s work to an audience of AI researchers was the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from his 30-year-old novel The Diamond Age:

Popular Culture (Wasteland and Sky): I know you’re probably wondering, if you’re over a certain age, when the internet stopped being a fun place to visit with a lot to see and do. If you’re under a certain age you might even be resentful over why so many people spend so much time in a place as boring as the internet. These two views are obviously opposites, but they are also both correct. The answer is that the internet was once a much different place than it is today, and what it is today is a far cry of what it once was.

Tolkien (Yahoo News): Sculptures of two giant eagles from the Lord Of The Rings films will be removed from New Zealand’s Wellington Airport this month after looming over travellers for 12 years.

The sculptures, one bearing the wizard Gandalf and which hover in the terminal, have delighted tourists and scared children since 2013.

D&D (Grognardia): Released in 1984, module UK4, The Gauntlet concludes the two-part series begun in The Sentinel. Like much of TSR UK’s output, it blends folklore, moral nuance, and grounded fantasy with a strong sense of pacing and player choice. Written by Graeme Morris, The Gauntlet stands out for its attempt to transform the traditional gameplay of Dungeons & Dragons into something more focused on infiltration, diplomacy, and layered conflict than on brute-force dungeon crawling. By and large, it’s successful.

Louis L’Amour (Curious Man’s Podcast): Matt Crawford speaks with Beau L’Amour about his stewardship of his father Louis L’Amour’s catalog. L’Amour eventually wrote 100 novels, over 250 short stories, and (as of 2010) sold more than 320 million copies of his work. By the 1970s his writings were translated into over ten languages. Every one of his works is still in print. Beau has taken that vast body of work, managed and released previously unpublished works as well as an audio series.

Cold Steel (Frontier Partisans): The boarding ax was the maritime cousin of the tomahawk, and served similar functions — a day-to-day tool and a fearsome melee weapon. The boarding ax tended to be a little longer in the haft and sometimes larger and heavier in the head than the tomahawk, but they weren’t standardized, and some are virtually identical to their woodland counterparts.

Biography (Rough Edges): I never get tired of reading about Robert E. Howard and his work. I’ve read several biographies and books about his writings and countless articles on those subjects. So I am definitely the target audience for ROBERT E. HOWARD: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A TEXAS AUTHOR, the massive new REH biography by Willard M. Oliver published by the University of North Texas Press in hardcover and e-book editions. (It doesn’t hurt that I’m a graduate of UNT, or as it was known when I went there, North Texas State University.)

Robert E. Howard (Woman of Letters): For the past week, I’ve been reading a set of stories, written by Robert E. Howard in the early 1930s, about a tall, brawny, sword-wielding adventurer named Conan. These stories take place in a fantasy world that resembles the early Iron Age.

D&D (Grognardia): E. Gary Gygax died on March 4, 2008, at the age of 69. Just over three weeks later, this blog published its first post. That was no coincidence.

Edgar Rice Burroughs (Paperback Warrior): Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote two Tarzan serials that were published in 1919 and 1920. The first was titled “Tarzan the Untamed “ (aka “Tarzan and the Huns”) and was published in Redbook from March to August 1919. The second was “Tarzan and the Valley of Luna”, published in All-Story Weekly from March to April 1920. The two stories were combined to make one complete novel, Tarzan the Untamed, in 1920 by A.C. McClurg (illustrations by J. Allen St. John). I chose to read the novel version, often presented as the seventh in the Tarzan series (after the short-story collection Jungle Tales of Tarzan).

T.V. (Kit Sun Cheah): Once it was a global cultural phenomenon. Now Squid Game has become one of the most bitterly polarized IPs in recent memory. The reason is simple: the ending. Audiences can forgive almost anything. What they can’t forgive is a terrible ending. While hailed as ‘dark’ and ‘realistic’, the ending of the final season of Squid Game left much of the fanbase disappointed.

Comic Books (Bleeding Fool): Revealed at today’s Conan the Barbarianpanel at SDCC, Heroic Signatures and Titan Comics are thrilled to announce the return of KULL – the fierce and cunning warrior created by Robert E. Howard – to comics in 2027!

Also revealed at the panel were more details, and a first look at artwork for two upcoming landmark and unmissable issues, coming this October – CONAN THE BARBARIAN #25and a stunning new Issue #1 – THE SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN: REFORGED featuring vivid all-new color restorations of classic THE SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN black-and-white stories!

Fiction (Imaginative Conservative): An American original, Ray Bradbury will almost certainly enjoy a high reputation for centuries to come. The future will remember him for hundreds of short stories and at least four profound novels of gothic Americana: Fahrenheit 451; The Martian Chronicles; Something Wicked this Way Comes; and Dandelion Wine.

Magazines (Pulp Super Fan): Pulp Adventures #47 from Bold Venture Press, dated Winter 2025 is the first issue of the year. This one is a C. Auguste Dupin themed issue, with both an original story and a new one. There are detective, western, science fiction, urban crime, and more.

Conventions (The Cimmerian): The Brownwood Bulletin published not one but two nice articles about Howard Days, the first one preceding the event and the second one in the wake of it. Unfortunately, the newspaper archives their articles after a few days and charges ridiculous amounts of money for access. For anyone who is interested, the text is reprinted below. Each included several photographs of the house, Howard’s grave in Greenleaf Cemetery, and one of the panels in the pavilion.

Fiction (History Debunked): The first recorded use of the word ‘steampunk’ dates back to 1987 and 30 years later, steampunk has expanded to include not only literature, but also computer games, graphic novels, art, clothing, various accessories such as walking sticks, fob-watches and glasses and even music. The word refers now not merely to a type of science fiction, but to an entire style of fashion.

Fantasy (Black Gate): The eighties was full of epic fantasy series’ by the likes of David Eddings, Raymond Feist, Stephen R. Donaldson, Terry Brooks and Katherine Kurtz, to name a few. While many remain giants in the history of the genre, Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote a largely forgotten series: The Lords of Dus.

Fiction (With Both Hands): One of the standout books is also a new book, Yuval Kordov’s Orders of Magnitude [Amazon link]. I picked this up and loved it. Orders of Magnitude is a blend of adventure and horror with both demons and space marines that manages to be quite Catholic. This is quite an accomplishment as Kordov himself is not Catholic.

Science Fiction (Fantasy Literature): Although Ohio-born author Edmond Hamilton had given his readers much in the way of action, spectacle, alien races, futuristic science, and cosmic wonder in the first two novels of his so-called STARWOLF TRILOGY – The Weapon From Beyond (1967) and The Closed Worlds (1968) – there was yet one element that he seemed to be holding in abeyance.

Games (Wertzone): Back in 1977, Game Designers’ Workshop released a curious black box emblazed with a line of dialogue: “This is Free Trader Beowulf, calling anyone…Mayday, mayday, we are under attack…main drive is gone…turret number one not responding…mayday…losing cabin pressure fast…calling anyone…please help…this is Free Trader Beowulf…mayday.” Underneath, in striking red on a black background, was the name TRAVELLER, which we were told means, “Science-Fiction Adventure in the Far Future.”

Fiction (The Obelisk): There are never “routine” nights for doctors. This is especially true if you’re a practicing medicine man in the Big Apple. In A. Merritt’s Burn, Witch, Burn!, the sawbones in question—Doctor Lowell—is called upon one evening by an infamous gangster. Said gangster (Ricori) brings with him a horrifying piece of cargo in the form of Peters, a recently deceased associate. Ricori offers the doc ten thousand dollars to discover the true cause of Peters’ strange death.

Comic Books (50 Year Old Comic Books): I’d picked up Eerie #59 — an issue which was allegedly an all-reprint collection, and included several stories I already owned, sort of.  I use the qualifying terms “allegedly” and “sort of” because, while the artwork for all ten “Dax the Damned” stories featured there had indeed appeared in Eerie previously, all ten had also received new scripts by Budd Lewis for this encore presentation — a move that turned the sword-and-sorcery adventure strips illustrated (and originally written) by Spanish artist Esteban Maroto into what amounted to completely different stories than they’d been in their initial English-language versions.

Fiction (Kairos): On this special occasion, Peter brings us a startling true tale of historic true crime, haunting horror, and classic literature. And this real ghost story is distingushed from dime-a-dozen creepypastas and FoaF campfire yarns by the direct invovlement of legendary author Rudyard Kipling.

Myth (Caleb Howells): This video examines Geoffrey of Monmouth’s claims about the kings of the Catuvellauni tribe ruling over Cornwall and attempts to explain these references through the historical facts about the Catuvellauni, the Dobunni, and the Cornovii.

History (Metatron): The Origins of The CELTS – A Deep Dive Into CELTIC Ethnogenesis