A Baumy Christmas In preparation for this year’s ChristmaSFF read, I did a little bit of sifting around for information about L. Frank Baum, the author of The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. He’s much more widely known as the writer of the Oz books, which were my early childhood […]
The illustrious Poul Anderson is another one of those scifi/fantasy grandmasters who you’ve probably never heard of if you were born after 1980. Although he was writing until his death in 2001, he seems to have fallen into obscurity in the later decades of his career, which is a damn […]
I’ve been thinking about magic lately, and I’ve got a post brewing…but it’s not quite ready yet. It did bring me back around to thinking about John Bellairs, however, and his The Face in the Frost. In case you’re unfamiliar with them, Bellairs was mainly a writer of young adult gothic […]
This morning I started reading Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey,” and had intended to write a full reaction to it, but, well, I ran out of time and haven’t even finished it yet. It’s been difficult to keep up with my reading and nerding lately, I admit. Lots of “real” […]
Hawkman, the comic book superhero, was apparently created in 1940 by Gardner Fox of Appendix N fame. This post wasn’t originally intended to include him beyond a cursory note, but I found it quite interesting and coincidental that Fox should come up in this context, given my preoccupation in recent […]
You might argue that Roger Zelazny’s brand of fantasy is plenty infected by modernism, as some would put it. You might also argue that he was doing some hard drugs when he wrote it. But it’s not the apple that fell from the Tolkien tree of Fantasy. Earlier this year […]
It seems to be a recurring theme with me – that for years I was unaware of such-and-such an author or was mistaken about the nature of his or her writings. Such was the case with Edgar Allen Poe. Last year, for the Halloween season, I did a little bit […]
Last month I wrote about the largely forgotten grandmaster of weird SFF, Clark Ashton Smith. Recently I’ve revisited the “best of” collection of another undeservedly obscured scifi great (and another Smith) – Cordwainer Smith. I wrote a bit about Cordwainer Smith last year over at the Castalia House blog. If […]
John “Jack” Holbrook Vance was born on 8/28/1916, just a little over one hundred years ago yesterday. “Who is Jack Holbrook Vance?” you may ask. Come, I will explain presently! The man named Jack Vance came from a moneyed family, but upon a turn of fortune was forced from youth […]
If you spend a lot of time reading/watching the news or plumbing the depths of social media, you may feel like everything is going to crap. You may be feeling like it’s time to despair, or that things have reached an all-time low. And I’m not going to pen an […]
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