Science Fiction Themes: What Has Changed?

October 31, 2018 GW Thomas 0

One of the darlings of the Gernsback magazines was author, Clare Winger Harris (1891-1968). She may be the first official “fan-girl” of that era. (C. L. Moore was the darling of Weird Tales but SF fans often ignored that magazine to their own peril.) Harris wrote eleven stories beginning with Read More

The Strange Moon Saga of Edgar Rice Burroughs by D. K. Latta

October 27, 2018 GW Thomas 1

American writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs, was a prolific creator of pulp and adventure stories. Burroughs wrote — as he himself would admit — for the money, but also had a versatile (and sometimes bizarre!) imagination, and he tried his hand at everything from historical fiction (The Outlaw of Torn) to Read More

J. Sheridan Le Fanu & the Critics: Seen Through Other Eyes

August 2, 2018 GW Thomas 0

If you read anything by Jack Sullivan or Mike Ashley you will see that today J. Sheridan Le Fanu has fans. Horror fans. He has been acknowledged as the first man to make a living writing horror stories. He was the linchpin between the clunky old Gothics of Radcliffe and Read More

Weird Tales Classics: “The Tree-Men of M’Bwa”

July 19, 2018 GW Thomas 0

“The Tree-Men of M’Bwa” by Donald Wandrei is one of those wonderful Weird Tales gems that I love to happen upon. The story was published in February 1932. It has only been reprinted in Wandrei collections, which surprises me. The story is so good, so weird in the true Lovecraftian Read More

The Curse of the Monolith

July 14, 2018 GW Thomas 0

Howard purists may hate every word I am about to say. While I will always agree that Robert E. Howard’s stories were the best of the Conan canon (he wrote some potboilers too), I do have some favs amongst the Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp pastiches. One such Read More

The Children of Dracula – Part Two: The Door of the Unreal

July 14, 2018 GW Thomas 0

Hollywood changes everything. A series of successful films and the commonly-held view of things changes. ‘Vampires turning to ash in sunlight’ is a good example. In Dracula, the Count can walk in the daylight but he hasn’t the power to turn into animals or smoke. This literary rigor mortis also Read More

The Children of Dracula – Part One: Brood of the Witch-Queen

July 14, 2018 GW Thomas 0

In “The Supernatural Horror in Literature” H. P. Lovecraft selects three novels as the offspring of Bram Stoker’s Dracula: “…Dracula evoked many similar novels of supernatural horror, among which the best are perhaps The Beetle, by Richard Marsh, Brood of the Witch-Queen, by “Sax Rohmer” (Arthur Sarsfield Ward), and The Read More

The Vampire As Lothario

July 11, 2018 GW Thomas 0

I love vampires. I hate Anne Rice. Not the person Anne Rice. I don’t know her. But the institution of Anne Rice. To be perfectly accurate: I hate Anne Rice vampires. I’ve always been of the Weird Tales/Kolchak the Nightstalker vampire variety. They’re bad. You stake’em, holy water’em, burn’em with Read More

Cormac Mac Art: The Comics

July 8, 2018 GW Thomas 0

The Savage Sword of Conan served up a monthly dose of Conan the Cimmerian along with secondary tales of Robert E. Howard’s other characters such as Solomon Kane, King Kull and Bran Mak Morn, plus the Howard/Roy Thomas amalgam Red Sonja. In the 235 issues, from August 1974 to July Read More

Lost in Space is Found — Again!

July 8, 2018 GW Thomas 0

by D.K. Latta For a family lost somewhere in deep space, the Robinson family keep finding their way back to our screens! There have been three main iterations of the concept — the original 1960s TV series, a 1998 feature film, and now a re-booted 2018 series for Netflix (not Read More

“The Tomb of Sarah” and Seabury Quinn

July 8, 2018 GW Thomas 0

The Jules De Grandin stories by Seabury Quinn were not innovative so much as reactionary. Anyone familiar with the Horror and Mystery of the previous generation can easily glean where the author found inspiration. Quinn’s magic lies not in creating a Cthulhu Mythos, but in taking a fully modern approach Read More

Edmond Hamilton’s “The Hidden World”

July 8, 2018 GW Thomas 0

“The Hidden World” (Science Wonder Quarterly, Fall 1929) by Edmond Hamilton was one of seven stories he wrote for Hugo Gernsback before 1930. I sought it out specifically to see how it compared to his earliest works at Weird Tales, which predate this Science Fiction epic. I was curious if Read More

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