A 1968 collection of essays  on the the Tough Guys of 30s fiction by diverse authors, primarily academic (including Carolyn See of UCLA (Extension at the time) - her dissertation was on the Hollywood novel, and her essay here explores the well-populated cross-section of Hollywood and tough guys). I picked it up at an estate sale on a whim.

Probably ( Read more... )

I was idly poking around Supreme Court decisions about ranching land. As one does. And stumbled across this great description of authentic Zane Grey era cattle ranchers versus sheep ranchers sorta stuff. McKelvey v. United States (1922). The legal stiffs just need to punch up the word choices a little bit ( Read more... )

They said that Einstein's curved space theory was wrong, and it was the ten-dimensional multiple theory that was right.

John W. Campbell, "Elimination" (1936)

How cool is this?

I was contacted by Morgan Scorpion, who asked to record my story "Inlibration" (from the Eldritch Chrome anthology of cyber-Cthulhu stories). It's a strange experience hearing your own words read back to you, but I really enjoy her reading -- and suddenly feel guilty about sticking things like Korean slang and Đuro Đaković in ( Read more... )

Yep, it's that time again.

P Djeli Clark wrote an unflinching, exhaustive, and mostly fair essay on the topic ( Read more... )

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Edge collects a number of essays published primarily by Future Life (before it folded) and the LA Weekly in the early 80s. I hoped it would be something like the Glass Teat, which I remember fondly even though the media references are mostly before my time -- speaking of which, let me drop in a link that John Tynes shared about millennials ( Read more... )

At long last, Chaosium has published and released Eldritch Chrome, an anthology of Lovecraftian cyberpunk stories, including one by your humble narrator.

I'm rather tepid about this collection of short stories. Certainly well-written, with many vivid characters and set-ups, but most of the stories seemed to be missing some crucial element. In some cases, I think this was deliberate as a (failed?) attempt to create more mystery in the story. In other cases, the stories were missing something more ( Read more... )

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