James Bond (Art of the Movies): Ian Fleming regarded the secret service as a “dirty trade,” and he knew better than most what he was talking about. As a Naval Intelligence man, he rubbed shoulders with his fair share of secret agents and was familiar with their business. Indeed, Fleming himself had a hand in top-secret missions during WWII, such as Operation Mincemeat, a ploy to throw the Third Reich off the scent by deploying a corpse carrying fake documents in the waters off the coast of Spain.

Tolkien (Lotus Eaters): The Tolkien Society Are Still Wormtongues

Publishing (Kairos on Substack): It’s one of those truths that everyone suspects but few dare say aloud: The terms “science fiction” and “fantasy” are dead. Not just dead in any quaint, nostalgic sense, but utterly irrelevant, useless, and unfit for purpose.

Review (Nerdrotic): BACK TO BASICS! F1 Mini-Review

Pulp (Rough Edges): The art on this cover is by Robert Gibson Jones, who did a bunch of covers, most of them excellent, for FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. William Brengle, author of the lead novella, is a house-name, and the actual author behind this one is Howard Browne.

Tolkien (Middle Earth Daily): What happened on July 4th in Middle-earth? Thorin’s Company treks through the Misty Mountains. Boromir sets out from Minas Tirith to seek for Rivendell.

Cinema (Fandom Pulse): Vincent D’Onofrio, the actor who plays Kingpin in Marvel Studios’ Daredevil: Born Again, responded to a fan who claimed that Disney nerfed his character.

New (DMR Books): Whether your blood is Celtic or not, these action-packed thrill-tales are guaranteed to get it pumping! Celtic Adventures is available in both trade paperback and digital editions. Click here to order.

Fiction (Silver Key): My friend Ken Lizzi, one of the dudes with whom I split a house rental at 2023 Robert E. Howard Days, is having his Cesar the Bravo fiction collected and kickstarted by Cirsova. Cesar, a sometimes-condottiero and a bravo by trade, has earned a reputation as one of the best swords for hire in the city of Plenum. If you need a foe humiliated before a cheering crowd, he’s your man! 

Robert E. Howard (Stephen Gaspar): A cold open is a dramatic technique referred to in television and film, where an exciting scene is presented before the opening credits or title. It’s a way to immediately engage the audience and introduce the story.

New (Frontier Partisans): Frontier Partisan Deuce Richardson wrote the introduction for this brand new collection of Celtic adventure tales from DMR Books. The cover is by the immortal Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick. How they got that done I do not know, but it’s badass.

Star Wars (The Rebel Clone): These are all the deleted scenes from Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope that Troopy and I could track down. Around 16 minutes of strange, slow, and sometimes brilliant footage you were never meant to see.  …

Robert E. Howard (Comics Radio): “The Lord of Samarcand,” (also published as “The Lame Man”) by Robert E. Howard, was published in the Spring 1932 issue of Oriental Stories. It is, I think, one of the grimmest tales that Howard ever told. And, by golly, it works. It’s a vivid example of how Howard could use descriptive prose together with strong characterizations to keep his reader engrossed from start to finish.

History (Raymond Ibrahim): Slaughter at Hattin: Saladin’s Vengeance on the Knights of Christ

Biography (Stygian Dogs): In this second of several planned videos documenting my time at Howard Days 2025, I offer you an overview and review of Willard M Oliver’s new book (released April 2025) ‘Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author’ – accompanied by the author’s comments on his work and his path to Conan and Howard in general.

History (Frontier Partisans): The rifle was one of many material objects which colonists of British North America brought with them from Europe. Starting in the early eighteenth century, German-speaking settlers in Pennsylvania began to manufacture rifles from locally made and imported parts.

Robert E. Howard (Black Gate): It can’t be a Summer of Pulp without some Robert E. Howard now, can it? Heck no!!! The looong shadow cast by my buddy Dave Hardy, with his two terrific essays on El Borak, still prevents me from tackling ‘The Swift.’ However, I am comfortable continuing to blaze my own trail regarding the similar, but different, Kirby O’Donnell.

History (History Debunked with Simon Webb): Mention Neville Chamberlain to anybody today and you are sure to be told that he was the arch-appeaser, a weak prime minister who spent the three years of his premiership allowing Adolf Hitler to do as he pleased in Europe and avoiding confrontation and conflict at any cost. So firmly embedded in public consciousness is this erroneous and misleading version of history, that it is perhaps hopeless to set the record straight at this late date, but I shall give it a try anyway. Before doing so, let’s try a little quiz.

D&D (Grognardia): In the early days of this blog, I wrote a Retrospective post about Against the Giants, the 1981 compilation module that first introduced me to Gary Gygax’s famed G-series. That post focused less on the individual modules themselves than on my memories of discovering, playing, and refereeing them.

Pulp ( Western Fiction Review): This publication of Street & Smith’s Western Story is a partial reprint of the American issue from September 1948. The UK version first appeared in 1939 and continued, with slight changes to its title, until 1961. By my count, there were 167 issues.

Small Press (Pulp Super Fan): Unique Tales #1 (1974), subtitled “the weird magazine,” and boy is it. It’s 4-by-11-inches with a goldenrod cover with line art. It comes in at 50 pages and was supposedly only 500 copies from Shroud. Due to the length, we mainly get very short poems and short-short stories. Of the notable items is a poem by George Allan England and short stories by Robert Silverberg and Fred C. Adams. For me, the interesting piece was an editorial where Krueger spoke about the publication of Fantasy Classics and Fantasy Reader at Fantasy House.