by David A. Hardy, C. J. Burch, Jack Mackenzie & G. W. Thomas In the tradition of Lin Carter’s FLASHING SWORDS anthologies of the 1970s, G. W. Thomas has assembled four novellas of Heroic Fantasy, longer tales of swords and sorcery. Featuring David A. Hardy’s “Temple of the Rakshasas”, set in ancient times, it follows Read More
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
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
Dark Worlds Magazine was an effort to recapture the excitement of the old days of the pulp magazines. Magazines like Amazing Stories and Astounding Science Fiction and Weird Tales. It was also an experiement in producing a magazine in the new print-on-demand marketplace. Ultimately it was an experiment that failed. Myself and former Amazing Stories blogger G. Read More
“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
If you are a fan of science fiction and if, as I do, you have a particular love for space opera, then you probably have come across the name Perry Rhodan. If you’re anything like me then you would have spent many hours scouring paperback aisles or racks looking for Read More
Though fans of the Perry Rhodan series will bend over backwards to even deny the film’s existence, Mission Stardust (or, as it was known in Italian: …4…3…2…1…Morte) is a 1967 science fiction film based on the early novels. The film is hopelessly of its time. From the psychedelic opening credits Read More
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
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
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 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
“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