The Sword & Sorcery of Clark Ashton Smith
Sword & Sorcery as an idea never existed back in 1936. I chose that date because it was the year Robert E. Howard killed himself. Read More
Tag: Weird Tales
Link: The Feud That Never Was
I was enjoying Bob Powell’s Complete Cave Girl (Dark Horse) and something in the editorials got me thinking. Why didn’t Edgar Rice Burroughs sue when Read More
Link: When Planets Clashed: War in Space
Manly Wade Wellman continually surprises me. “When Planets Clashed,” his writing debut back in Wonder Stories Quarterly Spring 1931 is no exception. I expected a juvenile Read More
Wan Tengri in Conan the Barbarian
Flame Winds was a Sword & Sorcery novel written by Norvell W. Page back in the Pulp days of John W. Campbell. It appeared in Read More
Robots Before the Pulps
The robot is an icon of Science Fiction, alongside the spaceship, the alien and the time machine. Of all these familiar themes, the robot is Read More
Link: Wait Here While I Describe the Eldritch Horror: Weird Tales Radio?
You learn the strangest things when you read “The Eyrie,” the old letter column in Weird Tales. Like that a boyish Julius Schwartz was a Read More
Link: Yuggoth, Our Ninth Planet
One of the best parts about reading older fiction – say, the detective fiction of the 1880s or the pulp stories of the 1920s – Read More
The Martian Riding Beast & Other Forms of Transport
Writers of the fantastic have had to make peace with an idea that may not sit well with them. That is quite simply, once you Read More
The Men Who Saved Sword & Sorcery
It’s easy to assume, while perusing through old Lancer paperbacks or any of the dozens of 1970s novels, that Sword & Sorcery was a roaring Read More
Fan Fury: If You Cut Me, Do I Not Bleed in Four Colors?
I have been spending the last three months on research – that essentially means taking apart scans of Pulps so that I can aggregate the Read More