Blog Archives
sAn Overlooked Gem: “The Green Odyssey” by PJ Farmer
Saturday , 1, July 2017 Before the Big Three, Book Review 3 CommentsLate one night last year, I was looking for a new book to read and discovered that there was another work by PJ Farmer added to Project Gutenberg, The Green Odyssey. A few hours later, I had finished a swashbuckling classic, a full-blooded adventure to rank with the best of Howard, Stevenson, or Sabatini. And […]
How Not To Write Pulp: Brood of the Witch Queen
Monday , 24, April 2017 Before the Big Three, Book Review, Fiction 5 CommentsAs noted in a recent article, Sax Rohmer managed to write one of the greatest pulp novels ever, The Insidious Dr.Fu-Manchu, as well as one of its worst, Brood of the Witch-Queen. While I examined the former in-depth, I didn’t do so for the latter. Well, I believe any negative opinion of a book deserves a full […]
The Pulp One-Hit Wonder: Sax Rohmer
Saturday , 22, April 2017 Authors, Before the Big Three, Book Review, Fiction 14 CommentsAt first glance, it seems strange that Arthur Henry Ward, writing under the pseudonym Sax Rohmer, doesn’t garner more attention on this blog. After all, he wrote the enormously entertaining, successful, and influential The Insidious Dr.Fu-Manchu. But upon further reflection, it makes sense. The book in question is not fantasy or science fiction. And as we […]
John Carter of Pellucidar
Saturday , 15, April 2017 Appendix N, Authors, Book Review, Fiction 18 CommentsNot too long ago, HP of Throwback Thursday fame and I decided to both read the same book and write up our reactions. This wouldn’t be the first time for us, though this time we agreed on a book mutually and well ahead of time. Because he is a gentleman, he also offered to let […]
Scooter reviews Wool: Omnibus Edition 1-5 (Silo Series) by Hugh Howey Nearly every mainstream review of “Wool”, the Kindle Direct omnibus that made the traditional publishing industry do a double take, has described it as “sci-fi’s answer to Fifty Shades of Grey”. The comparison, thankfully, has little to do with the content and everything to […]
A short, but intriguing review of Tom Kratman’s Big Boys Don’t Cry: The whole work is a little surprising coming from Kratman, who knows and conveys that war is hell but has never before shown much inclination to question its ethical dimension at this level. At the end, he comes off almost like the hippies […]
Jack Campbell—the pseudonym of a retired US Navy officer—wants to tell us some stories about honor and large space fleet actions. He wastes no time introducing us to the protagonist or lecturing us about the righteousness of the good guys (the Alliance) or why they are fighting the bad guys (the Syndicate Worlds). We jump […]