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A recent essay by REHupa's Morgan Holmes discusses some science fiction critical essay books written by James Blish under the pseudonym William Atheling, Jr. In the books, Blish runs down Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and A. Merritt ( Read more... )

NICE!

Paizo's latest Planet Stories release, Leigh Brackett's The Reavers of Skaith has an introduction by George Lucas, who worked with Brackett on the first draft of the script for The Empire Strikes BackAt this week's Planet Stories meeting, we wondered if we might be able to get the book mentioned on StarWars.com, which (I probably don't need ( Read more... )

Adventure fiction has a stronger connection to art than any other genre. It's difficult to think of Tarzan without a visual landscape provided by J. Allen St. John or Conan the Barbarian without summoning the spirit of Frank Frazetta.

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Back in July of last year I engaged in an ambitious project I dubbed The Sword & Sorcery Vision Quest, in which I would read through all of my multi-author sword & sorcery anthologies in an effort to better understand the genre with an eye toward building an entertaining Planet Stories anthology on the subject ( Read more... )

It's generally understood by most modern science fiction readers that the pre-Space Age solar system of the pulps shared certain commonalities based on influential works of early scientifiction and "best guess" hypotheses based on existing scientific knowledge. In this way Mars was generally thought to be an arid desert landscape criss-crossed by ( Read more... )

My obsession with Facebook continues unabated, made worse by the fact that I can now check it and post to it remotely from my new iPhone ( Read more... )

Last year I decided to take the "52-Book Challenge," an attempt to average one book a week for the entire year of 2007. I managed a fairly dismal 28 books, of course not counting material I edited for my job at Paizo and not counting the (tons) of short stories I've been reading in pulps and anthologies. I looked forward to 2008 as a chance to read ( Read more... )

You guys seem to be getting a kick out of Virgil Finlay's art, so I skipped over to a different pile in my pulp collection and scanned some images from Fantastic Novels and Famous Fantastic Mysteries. These two related magazines are among my very favorites, as their mission was to preserve the greatest science fiction and fantasy stories from the ( Read more... )

My latest Kuttner post doesn't seem to have stirred up much interest, probably because none of my readers have actually read "When the Earth Lived" themselves, and thus no one has much to contribute to the ongoing discussion ( Read more... )