Sensor Sweep: Mike Shayne, Michael Moorcock, Leigh Brackett
Fantasy (DMR Books): Renegade Swords IV will feature an obscure sword-and-sorcery story by Michael Moorcock! Moorcock is best known for his “Eternal Champion” cycle of stories, which encompasses almost all of his fantasy work. “The Dark Rider,” however, is a standalone tale of Dark Age Britain.
Publishing (Wasteland & Sky): I don’t think I have to tell you much about the mess that is OldPub, the old publishing industry sometimes mistakenly called “TradPub” (there is nothing “traditional” about them), and how far they’ve declined. It’s fairly obvious just from one perusal of the shelves of your local big bookstore that they are far beyond irrelevant despite all the money and “prestige” they have behind them.
Horror (Tellers of Weird Tales): In “Fifty-Two Miles to Terror” by Alex Gaby (The Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 14, 1956, reprinted ten years later in 52 Miles to Terror and Other Stories of the Road), a man named Biff, driving on a lonely road in the American West, is tormented by the unseen driver of a red hotrod. The driver of the hotrod is anonymous. The threat seems embodied in the vehicle itself.
Science Fiction (Stuff I Like): Bill Ward and I had been meaning to get back to our re-read series at some point last year, but we both got busy. And so we decided to start the new year with a read of one of my favorite Leigh Brackett stories, “The Last Days of Shandakor.” It was the third read for me, but Bill was new to the tale, and so was Fletcher Vredenburgh, who we invited aboard.
Comic Books (Lotuseaters.com): Connor and Harry discuss Mark Waid and Alex Ross’ epic capstone to DC Comics’ Dark Age, Kingdom Come (1996), and the history of the creative highs and Rob-Liefeld-lows of the comics industry in the 1990s.
Fantasy (Fandom Pulse): S.L Rowland is one of the pioneers of LitRPG and cozy fantasy, dominating the Amazon charts with his character-driven work that’s captivated a substantial audience. His work has been so integral to the community that he’s got a character in Dungeon Crawler Carl named after him.
Fantasy (Por Por Books): ‘The Jewel in the Skull’ first was published in the US in 1967 by Lancer Books. Moorcock was unhappy with Lancer’s editing of his novel, and thus, the ‘preferred’ edition of ‘Jewel’ is that issued by DAW Books in January, 1977 (176 pp., DAW Books No. 225, cover art by Richard Clifton-Dey).
Weird Tales (M Porcius): After today I will have read at least one story (in fact it looks like I will have read at least three stories) from each of the six issues of Weird Tales with a 1943 cover date. We are making progress in our grand quest to have read something from each issue of Weird Tales, a periodical the life of which spans from 1923 to 2025.
Comic Books (Arkhaven Comics): I have Red Sonja fatigue. I was never too crazy about the character to begin with. There are some art and Robert E. Howard groups on social media that have a never ending parade of Red Sonja illustrations, most by artists I never heard of. It is to me a strange obsession.
Review (Nerdrotic): House of the Dragon Season 3 REVIEW | Episode 7 “The Dragon In Winter”
Streaming (Critical Drinker): She-Hulk was one of the biggest disasters in Marvel history, but the story of what was going on behind the scenes and how it killed showrunner Jessica Gau’s career almost overnight, is something we only learned about recently.
S-F Cons (Jon Del Arroz): Worldcon used to be the World Science Fiction Convention; now it’s just about diversity andn ot much else, pushing Romantasy and more for an aging crowd that doesn’t do anything with sci-fi.
Fiction (Vintage Pop Fictions): Redcap, published in 1961, was the second of Philip McCutchan’s Commander Shaw spy thrillers. The fact that Shaw, like James Bond, is an ex-naval officer who served in the Second World War might lead one to expect him to be a Bond clone.
Tolkien (Darth Gandalf): In this video, we look at the Brown Lands, the plain south of Mirkwood where Sauron committed one of the most atrocious acts in the entire history of Middle-earth. Thousands of years later, the lands still bear those scars.
Crime Fiction (Paperback Warrior): Mike Shayne debuted in 1939 with Davis Dresser writing under the pen name Brett Halliday. After Dresser stepped back from the series in 1958, the Brett Halliday name became a house pseudonym shared by several authors, with Robert Terrall eventually emerging as its principal steward. By the time Armed…Dangerous was published in 1966 as the 54th Mike Shayne novel, Terrall had firmly taken control of the series. This is a weird installment in the series because Mike Shayne’s name doesn’t appear in the novel for the first 40 pages.
Fiction (Glorious Trash): I had a grand old time re-reading this third volume of The Baroness; I found that I remembered many things from the first time I read it, back in 2011. This is still my favorite cover art in the series, courtesy Hector Garrido, and overall Donald “Paul Kenyon” Moffitt does a great job keeping the story moving while indulging in his sci-fi interests…and featuring his frequent, pages-consuming sex scenes.
Review (Obelisk): The Innswich Horror sees Foster Morely, an H.P. Lovecraft superfan, travel the same small New England towns as his idol in the tense year of 1939. When Morley winds up in Innswich, he starts to recognize that Lovecraft based The Shadow Over Innsmouth on a real town with real monstrosities. The horror in Innswich unfolds quickly, as Morley is shown perversities from the ocean, from the mind, and from the soul of science.
Art (John Coulthart): Since Barry Windsor-Smith was absent from the previous post (or there in spirit via the pages of The Studio) I thought I’d post a few of his prints from the mid-70s. As I said in the Snaps piece, Smith and co. set up The Studio in order to concentrate on art that was creator-owned and free of the constraints they were forced to work under in the comics field. This didn’t mean that they completely abandoned the subjects which had made them popular artists.
Review (Sprague de Camp Fan): “Isle of Swords” is a highly competent pastiche of Robert E. Howard’s Cormac Mac Art stories. Bear in mind that none of the Cormac Mac Art stories sold in REH’s lifetime. The four Cormac Mac Art stories that REH wrote are: “The Night of the Wolf,” “Swords of the Northern Sea,” “The Temple of the Abomination,” and “Tigers of the Sea.”