I commented on FIMFiction Net on Xepher's story Three Wishes: the Hole in the Sun (sequel to another excellent story by the same author), that if I wanted to introduce Rainbow Dash to genre science fiction I'd start with E. E. "Doc" Smith's "Galactic Patrol," which our favorite supersonic pegasus would probably consider "AWESOME!"  That led me to ( Read more... )

Recently I posted a review of Marc Laidlaw's excellent "The Boy Who Followed Lovecraft" (2011) on Fantastic Worlds (review available here, story available here), and I mentioned that it was in many respects inspired by two particular Lovecraft stories:  "The Outsider" for some elements of structure, and "Medusa's Coil" in terms of the final ( Read more... )

THE JAMESON SATELLITE
By NEIL R. JONES

The mammoths of the ancient world have been wonderfully preserved in the ice of Siberia. The cold, only a few miles out in space, will be far more intense than in the polar regions and its power of preserving the dead body would most probably be correspondingly increased. When the hero-scientist of this story ( Read more... )

"The Man Who Found Out" is an excellent example of "pure cosmic horror" in that the horror derives totally from knowledge which is (in-story) so terrible that it forever blights the minds of the knowers.  First Professor Ebor and then Dr. Laidlaw learn the contents of the Tablets of the Gods, and even though this information is short enough to be ( Read more... )

This is a by-topic table of contents for Fantastic Worlds.  "PG" = "Project Gutenberg."  In a few cases a post includes both a story reprint and a story review, and such are listed twice:  once under each category.

Introduction

"Entering Some Fantastic Worlds" (Jordan S. Bassior, Jan 23rd 2011)

Introduction and mission statement for the blogzine.

( Read more... )

Publication

This story was originally published in If - Worlds of Science Fiction (June 1954) and can be read online in its entirety at

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32744/32744-h/32744-h.htm

It was anthologized in Brian Aldiss' Evil Earths (1976), so I do ( Read more... )

It's been pointed out to me that not everyone knows all of Andrew Marston's screen names. Well, here are the ones he's used so far on my site.

The main one is yamamanamaas in http://yamamanama.livejournal.comRead more... )

Phillip James Plauger is a physicist and nuclear physicist, who wrote only a dozen or so science fiction short stories, mostly in the 1970's, then in 1995 founded Dinkumware, Ltd., a company which supplies Standard C and Standard C++ libraries. The world of information technology has benefitted, but the world of science fiction sadly lost by this ( Read more... )

I've learned with some alarm that Andrew P. Marston of Marshfield MA has been engaging in some fairly extreme and illegal cyber-stalking of my friends who post to this Livejournal account. I've just banned him and ask everyone else to refrain from commenting should he post anonymously: I'll do my part by deleting his posts unreplied, so you ( Read more... )

N. K. Jemisin argues, in "But, but, but - WHY does magic have to make sense?"

http://nkjemisin.com/2012/06/but-but-but-why-does-magic-have-to-make-sense/

that magic in a story shouldn't have to make sense, because

This is magic we’re ( Read more... )