Archive for the "Fantasy" Category

Lin Carter, Edgar Rice Burroughs, George R.R. Martin and the Fantasy Dilemma

It’s difficult to express why I like ‘Jandar of Callisto’ It’s obviously not a very good book: an unashamed pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs ‘Princess of Mars’, with poor or variable writing at times, unconvincing characters and some awkward dialogue. Perhaps the best way to express this is by comparison with Burroughs himself and a […]

Soap 7 review – over a decade late

The wonders of the internet. While trying to trace a pirate download of my SF story “Soap 7” I discovered that  it had a very favourable review in 1991. You can read it in the The Mouth of Sauron (III) June 1991 one of  the, now virtually defunct, zines of the time. http://www.whiningkentpigs.com/DW/oldzines/sauron7-3.pdf

Heaven Maker – the strategic game

Anyone purchasing ‘The Heaven Maker and other Gruesome Stories’ might be interested to know about this website http://www.heavenmaker.com   “Heaven Maker is a stunning, high-octane, sci-fi strategy game, developed and published by Smite Entertainment” My computer slows  down and dies when I try to go anywhere near it but I’ve no doubt the least electrical […]

Devil’s Tor: David Lindsay

Reading ‘A Voyage to Arcturus’ as a youth I find myself indebted to Lin Carter the American author of science fiction and fantasy: although I always liked his work mostly I am indebted to his erudition and his editorialship. If the Ballantine edition of ‘A Voyage to Arcturus’ had not been made readily available by […]

Scottish Wedding: A True tale from Edinburgh in the 1980’s

When I was about twenty my brother fixed us up with a date with a pair of lovely Southern Belles from Georgia – finishing school the lot. They could demonstrate how to get out of a car without showing a leg, drink tea with finesse, walk elegantly; everything you’ve seen in ‘Gone with the Wind’. […]

The Eternal Lover: Edgar Rice Burroughs

‘NU, THE son of Nu, his mighty muscles rolling beneath his smooth bronzed skin, moved silently through the jungle primeval. His handsome head with its shock of black hair, roughly cropped between sharpened stones, was high held, the delicate nostrils questioning each vagrant breeze for word of Oo, hunter of men.’ So begins ‘The Eternal […]

Dunsany: Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of the Shadow Valley

Inspired by Nosferatu, a member of the Vault of Evil, whose unstinting gratitude offered free books to the read-hungry here’s a review of an author I much admired as a young man. David A Riley has remarked somewhere that he doesn’t read much fantasy nowadays and I’m the same. Having considered this I wondered whether […]

Des lewis Competition

Des Lewis is throwing a dice in this scam of a gambling whizz. Read below and if you like your weirdtongue weird have a look Des Lewis wordsmith extraordinaire has decided to give some books away for a dread price – only a little piece of your soul;  he tells it in his own words […]

Fantasy Quotes

A page devoted to pompous and weighty aphorisms invented by me On Theatre “Graves are doubtless cold but a silent auditorium generates a chill exponential to the hopes of the dwindling performance” On Genre “When genre writing grows popular with the intelligentsia it dies as literature” ‘Hard Science Fiction is the realists’ attempt to give […]

David Lindsay: A plea for help

David Lindsay, author of A Voyage to Arcturus and other speculative works failed in his lifetime to gain the reputation he deserved. A very small band of folks love his work (You’ll find an excellent site here) http://www.violetapple.org.uk The big question for me concerns the manuscript of A Voyage to Arcturus. It was substantially cut […]