Feminist Icon in a Chain Mail Bikini: Red Sonja: Queen of Plagues by Gail Simone and Walter Geovanni

Feminist Icon in a Chain Mail Bikini: Red Sonja: Queen of Plagues by Gail Simone and Walter Geovanni

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Red Sonja: Volume 1: Queen of Plagues (Dynamite Entertainment, March 4, 2014). Cover by Jenny Frison

If you saw the cover of Red Sonja: Volume 1: Queen of Plagues which accompanies this review before you started reading, your eyes probably popped with shock or narrowed with anger. The odds of either reaction went up if you were unhappy because it sported a cover controversially featuring a chick in a chain mail bikini.

Your reaction to the cover of Red Sonja: Volume 1: Queen of Plagues might not be entirely negative if you grew up reading the 1970s comics which featured the original chick in a chain mail bikini: the indomitable swords and sorcery character Red Sonja, the She-Devil with a Sword. In those years, I thought her chain mail bikini was the stupidest-looking costume ever to appear in a comic book (where there’s never a shortage of competition). Yet I was also inspired. I wanted to learn fencing, and she was supreme with a sword. And, even when an artist sexed her up, Red Sonja was the strongest female character I encountered with any regularity in my teen years.

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Cimmerian September – Conan and The Lost Valley of Iskander

Cimmerian September – Conan and The Lost Valley of Iskander

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Welcome back to week three of Cimmerian September.

Now, El Borak rivals Conan for my favorite REH character. I REALLY enjoy those stories. And I like Kirby O’Donnell, and I’ve covered those three tales, here at Black Gate. “Sword of the Hills”/”The Lost Valley of Iskander” is one of my favorites. It’s more like a Conan tale than any of the others. In fact, back in the days before Heroic Signatures started pushing out lots of new pastiches (some good, some less so), I started turning “Lost Valley…” into a Conan pastiche.

It was just for fun, whereas I’ve been very serious about my Sherlock Holmes, Solar Pons, and Nero Wolfe fiction. But if I were going to ‘do Conan,’ it would be with this story. Here’s the opening, which mirrors the El Borak original. 

Whatever you may think of this fragment, you absolutely should check out El Borak, if you haven’t. Dave Hardy wrote a killer essay about ‘The Swift’ for Discovering Robert E. Howard (he also wrote the Del Rey intro). So, read on!

The skittering of a stone broke the stillness and instantly awoke Conan, sleeping in the shadows of a rocky crag. With almost inhuman quickness, his right arm shot up and grasped a wiry wrist, halting the descent of a curved knife that glinted not in the starless sky. Corded muscles flexed, and the newcomer hissed between his teeth as he struggled in vain to push the knife through to its destination. The attacker’s weight held the Cimmerian on his back, but Conan brought his left hand up in a fist and smashed it into the side of his attacker’s head, barely noticeable pain bursting through his knuckles as they connected with the man’s skull.

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Into the Weird: Weird Tales, May 1923 (Volume 1, Number 3) Part 2

Into the Weird: Weird Tales, May 1923 (Volume 1, Number 3) Part 2

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Weird Tales, May 1923

The new format Weird Tales adopted for its third issue reached right into the table of contents, which dropped from two pages to one, with of necessity a more cramped layout. One extremely short story isn’t listed, but the magazine makes sure to promote “Nineteen Thrilling Short Stories” along with “Two Complete Novelettes.” That’s actually an increase over the last issue, which had sixteen short stories and two novelettes. So, having discussed the format in a previous post, let’s now look closely at this issue’s fiction.

And it is necessary with this issue to talk about race in Weird Tales, starting with the first story in the magazine (so this post will include quotations and mentions of period racism). “The Moon Terror,” by A.G. Birch, is promoted by a cover blurb; it’s 30,000 words long, 20,000 of which appear in this issue, with the conclusion in the next month’s magazine. It’s a textbook example of Yellow Peril racism, in which sinister East Asians menace white people and the Western world. In this case, the villains are a secret Chinese society who threaten the planet as a whole with increasingly powerful earthquakes.

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Ad Review: The Dragon Magazine 41, Part II

Ad Review: The Dragon Magazine 41, Part II

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The Dragon, Issue 41, cover by James Holloway

Last week, I began looking at the ads from issue 41 of The Dragon magazine.  This week I take a look at the ads I didn’t get to last week.

After looking at the in house ads places by TSR, ads for local gaming stories, miniatures, and a variety of accessories, it seems like a good time to turn my attention to some of the games being offered in the issue.  I’ll start, not with table top or board games, but rather play-by-mail games, which I attempted to play once, but could never really figure out how to interact with them.  For me, they were more an intriguing concept than a recreational outlet. I may not have been alone in that.  I only see four other articles on Black Gate that even mention play-by-mail games.

Two play-by-mail games were advertised in the issue.  The first, World Campaigns IV was a military campaign set following World War III as the players attempt to rebuild civilization. Rather than a massive player game, players set up in groups of 35 (and if you sent in your application with friends would be grouped together). The rules and first move cost $8, with subsequent moves costing $5 and a maximum of 8 moves per year. World Campaigns IV was based out of Dover, New Hampshire. Playtesting for the game began in 1977 with the game launching in 1980. In 1988 the game relaunched as World Campaigns V, which allowed for longer games. A computer moderated version was also launched in 1988.

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Forgotten Authors: Margaret Irwin

Forgotten Authors: Margaret Irwin

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Margaret Irwin

Margaret Irwin was born on March 27, 1889 in Highgate Hill, London to Andrew Clarke and Anna Julia (nee Baker) Irwin. Her father was originally from Perth, Australia. After her mother’s death in 1899 and her father’s death in 1902, Irwin was sent to be raised by her uncle, Sidney T. Irwin, a classics professor at Clifton College in Bristol. She was educated at Clifton High School in Bristol and went on to study at Oxford, where she took a degree in English.  Her uncle died in 1911.

Irwin’s earliest novel, How Many Miles to Babylon, was published in 1913 and was followed by a couple more novels in the teens before she hit her stride in the 1920s. Her 1924 novel Still She Wished for Company was a fantasy novel in which an occultist drew the heroine into 1779. It was followed a year later by These Mortals about a woman raised in isolation in a magical palace. Although she continued to, occasionally write short fiction with fantastic elements, such as “Monsieur Seeks a Wife” and “The Curate and the Rake,” the majority of her writing was historical fiction, for which she became well known.

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Wood for Sheep: Catan by Klaus Teuber

Wood for Sheep: Catan by Klaus Teuber

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Catan, Sixth Edition (Catan Studio, April 2025)

I’ve played a lot of Catan over the years, since friends in San Diego introduced me to it (back when it was called Settlers of Catan). I think it’s my favorite board game. It seems to be a widely liked one, so it may not be new to a lot of people reading this review. But if I’m going to talk about games, I think it certainly deserves inclusion.

Catan is mainly a game of economic development. The primary thing players do is to establish villages, roads, and cities on a fictitious large island or small continent. Their scores are primarily based on how many settlements they have on the board, though there are other ways to pick up points. There’s a small nod to violence in the form of the “robber,” an object that looks like a stylized pawn in chess and moves about the board from time to time, and in the ability of players to acquire “knights” that can compel the robber to go somewhere else; but at most this is a model of border raids or irregular war — no one ever takes over another player’s land or cities.

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Catching Up With Arkady Martine

Catching Up With Arkady Martine

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Arkady Martine

When Arkady Martine burst onto the scene with A Memory Called Empire in 2019 she did so with the type of debut that lives long in the memory. The novel pulled off something new authors dream of doing-injecting the genre with a style and characters that feel fresh. An award-winning sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, followed in 2022 as did multiple short stories and the novella Rose/House shortly in the years since. 

Martine has stood out even more for her unique background, being a climate scientist, historian, and academic. Under her real name, Dr. AnnaLinden Waller, she’s written boatloads of essays about everything from Byzantine imperialism to the most pressing climate issues of our time. 

Needless to say she is very, very busy. Thankfully, the author was more than happy to give her time to a wayward journalist writing for Black Gate. We caught up to talk about craft, empires, and where her writing will take us next.

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The Literacy Crisis: Dialogue Skimming

The Literacy Crisis: Dialogue Skimming

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Here we go again

Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

I am back again with more internet drama that I believe is all interconnected and all very much related to the current literacy crisis we are suffering. This time, it’s all about skimming. Specially, the revelation that all these social media “readers” are actually just skipping to the dialogue and reading only that. Let’s dive into this little nugget, shall we?

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By Crom, It’s Cimmerian September: The Birth of Conan Scholarship

By Crom, It’s Cimmerian September: The Birth of Conan Scholarship

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We’re back for week two of Cimmerian September. Hopefully you saw last week’s post on Marvel’s King Conan comic, which I read for the very first time, to write about. Having read three, it definitely ranks below the two long-running series’ it followed: The Savage Sword of Conan, and Conan the Barbarian, for me.

Some of you know I had a hand in Hither Came Conan, from Rogue Blades Foundation. It is a SUPERB collection of essays on the original Conan stories, from a veritable Hall of Fame of Robert E. Howard scholars and fans. You read some of the essays in the book here at Black Gate, first. Jason Waltz expanded it greatly, incorporating the terrific blog series done by the late, terribly missed, Howard Andrew Jones, and Bill Ward. he also commissioned some new essays, never seen before. I penned a few new ones, including a look at the foundation stone of Conan scholarship.

I came to the REH world from the Sherlock Holmes universe, where writings about Holmes (and Arthur Conan Doyle) probably exceed that of any other fictional character. I certainly contributed my share. As Christopher Morley famously said, “Never have so many written so much about so little.” I brought that Sherlockiana feel to the works of Two Gun Bob. You can find links to all my pieces here at Black Gate, at the end of this article.

But first, read the last essay from Hither Came Conan: REH, Two Fans, and the Birth of Conan Scholarship. 

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Weird Times 5: Food

Weird Times 5: Food

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A postcard showing an early-20th century Horne & Hardart automat
This is the fifth post in a series reflecting on the world of 1920s as a background for discussing the early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in a big city in 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine. What sort of things might you see? What do those things suggest about ways people think? What do they say about the stories they tell?

Let’s say you get hungry as you walk along, and think about getting some food later. Maybe you see a restaurant, and a grocery store near it. What kind of food will you be able to buy in the store? And what sort of a restaurant are you looking at? There are a lot of potential answers to that second question, but I want to focus on one admittedly unusual possibility. If you’re in the right city, especially New York or Philadelphia, maybe you have the chance to pop into an automat. And in New York, you might even spot a future Weird Tales writer drinking the hot chocolate.

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