Search Results for: my sword and soul brother

A Sword Has Two (New) Edges: A Review of New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Issue #2

New Edge Sword & Sorcery issue #2, Winter 2023 (December 8, 2023). Cover by Gilead Artist The second issue of New Edge Sword and Sorcery has been getting far less attention than its debut, likely because it lacks a story by legendary writer Michael Moorcock, but that’s a shame, as it actually exceeds its predecessor in every demonstrable way. This is editor Oliver Brackenbury’s third time at bat (including the Zero Issue) and he’s clearly getting a feel for how…

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NEW EDGE SWORD & SORCERY MAGAZINE First Two Issues Released

October 2022, Michael Harrington hosted an interview with Oliver Brackenbury on Black Gate; Brackenbury is the editor and champion of New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine. That post coincided with the release of the teaser Issue #0 including short fiction & non-fiction (free in digital format, or priced at cost on Amazon Print-on-Demand, through the New Edge Website). In Feb. 2023 Black Gate announced the magazine’s Kickstarter which succeeded and spurred the creation of the illustrated Issues 1 & 2 that are being…

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Talking Tolkien: Tolkien’s Evil Magic Sword – Anglachel

Talking Tolkien is back for another installment, and I’m bringing back one of my essays. Today’s essay is about a magic sword named Anglachel. It is really a minor element of the book, but the story of it weaves in and out of many other parts. That’s one of the true wonders of The Silmarillion. It’s a vibrant, interconnected history of Tolkien’s world. There are just SO many characters and stories throughout it. I’m in that weird, small group which…

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Might For Right: The Once and Future King, Part 1 by T.H. White

“I have been thinking,” said Arthur, “about Might and Right. I don’t think things ought to be done because you are able to do them. I think they should be done because you ought to do them.” King Arthur, p. 239 The Once and Future King I first read English author T.H. White’s The Once and Future King when I was seventeen, fresh from seeing the movie Camelot (1967) for the first time (the musical Camelot, by Lerner and Lowe…

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Samurai with a Twist

Samurai Spy (Japan, 1965) By the 1960s, the tropes of chambara films, i.e., samurai adventures, had become through endless repetition standardized and over-familiar. As with the Western film in America and Europe, it was time for variations on the theme less they lose their audience, and so antiheroes raised their unfeeling heads and genre crossovers appeared, such as the samurai-meet-kaiju Daimajin movies. This week we take a look at a couple of interesting antihero adventures plus a crossover with the…

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Weird Samurai

Lady Snowblood (Japan, 1973) Japanese chanbara (samurai swordplay) adventure shows and movies had a long history of being adapted from popular manga series. As the Sixties turned into the Seventies, chanbara manga got increasingly bizarre and extreme, and the screen adaptations followed. These historical fantasies drew on the avant-garde film movements of the last Sixties, but also pulled imagery and characters from traditional sources, melding dream-logic with ghostly revenants. Bracing stuff, and if it’s sometimes hard to follow their abrupt…

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Robert E Howard: The Poet And The Ladies Of The Night

Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy (Arkham House, 1976) and Dark Valley Destiny (Bluejay Books, 1983) Covers by Tim Kirk and Kevin Eugene Johnson Robert E. Howard and prostitutes is a complicated and fascinating subject. Not only is there a question of whether he visited the ladies of the night, there was also the issue of whether he was a virgin. In his REH biography, Dark Valley Destiny (1983) L. Sprague de Camp wrote, Some of Robert…

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Deep in Wildest Britain: Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock

I had the sense of recognition…here was something which I had known all my life, only I didn’t know it… English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams on discovering English folklore and folk music The late Robert Holdstock prefaced his 1984 novel, Mythago Wood with that quote, and that’s sort of how I feel about the book myself. Holdstock dug deeply into the idea of myth, how it might arise from a culture, and how, in turn, it might affect individuals. I have…

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A Deleted Excerpt from Immortal Muse, Revealed and Annotated by Stephen Leigh

A Review of Immortal Muse & Interview with Stephen Leigh Complements this Excerpt.   Jeanne Hébuterne / Amedeo Modigliani with commentary by Stephen Leigh, the author   To the reader: This abandoned and unfinished long draft section may not make a great deal of sense unless you’ve already read IMMORTAL MUSE (DAW Books 2014), an alternate history fantasy novel about exactly what the title implies: a genuine muse who is immortal, who also happens to have been Perenelle Flamel (b….

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Sinbads Three

Son of Sinbad (USA, 1955) Sinbad movies loom so large in the history of fantasy film that it’s remarkable there weren’t more of them — only six or seven live-action features from the Forties through the Seventies. Before the sword-and-sorcery boom of the Eighties, if you wanted to watch a film of heroic fantasy, the first thing you reached for probably had Sinbad in its title. We’ve already covered three of them in this series: Sinbad the Sailor (1947), The…

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