I love sword fighting. All of my favourite movies involve sword fights, and most of my favourite books. I love the Star Trek TOS episode where Sulu runs around with a sword, so it should come as no surprise that I primarily write sword and sorcery novels. The sorcery part’s easy – pretty well everyone knows I’m making that up, and so long as I keep things internally consistent, I’m in the clear. But what about the sword part? I can’t…
Cover by Tom Barber Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery By Brian Murphy Pulp Hero Press (282 pages, $19.95 in trade paperback/$7.99 digital, January 16, 2020) At long last, we have a history of the sword-and-sorcery genre, and a very welcome and erudite study it is. Brian Murphy is to be commended for his honest appreciation of our frequently dismissed and often mocked genre. He intelligently surveys the expanse of the sword-and-sorcery field warts and all, low points and…
New Edge Sword and Sorcery Magazine, championed by Oliver Brackenbury, has emerged over the last few years to provide a market with “love for the classics, and an inclusive, boundary-pushing approach to storytelling.” Black Gate has featured the crowdfunding for and reviews of the initial volumes (link). Today we highlight a crowdfunding endeavor that is in progress now, set to end on July 20th: a collection of six stories called Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes. Starting with this new anthology, Oliver…
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 (Mariner Books, October 17, 2023) Perhaps the most overused title for short story anthologies beings with “Best of.” In genre fiction, the heavyweight (in terms of both size and breadth of coverage) was the Gardner Dozois-edited The Year’s Best Science Fiction Stories that ran for 35 years until his death in 2018. And there are a whole slew of similar “Best of’s” for horror, dark fantasy, speculative fiction, you name a subgenre…
Fantastic magazine, edited by Ted White. August and October 1972. Covers by Jeff Jones and Mike Hinge My Retro Reviews of Amazing have concentrated on the Goldsmith/Lalli years, but I recently read this pair of issues from Ted White’s era, which extended from 1969 to 1979. As a youngster, I started reading Amazing in late 1974, so right in the middle of White’s editorship. These two issues, then, date a bit earlier than my first encounter with Amazing. I bought them…
Bloodstone (Warner, March 1975). Cover by Frank Frazetta “Kane’s power is that of science, not sorcery — although with elder-world science, the distinction becomes blurred. But then, to the untutored minds the distinction is difficult to grasp, for this lies in understanding the forces at work, and in the laws they obey. For example, to produce a deadly sword to wield in battle, a master smith will use secrets of his craft to smelt choice iron into steel, forge steel…
Old Moon Quarterly magazine, Issue #5 (138p). Cover art by Derek Moore Old Moon Quarterly is a magazine of dark fantasy and weird sword-and-sorcery. In the tradition of Clark Ashton Smith, Tanith Lee and Karl Edward Wagner, it contains stories of strange vistas, eldritch beings, and the bloody dispute thereof by both swordsmen and swordswomen. Old Moon Quarterly emerged in 2022 led by Editor-in-Chief Julian Barona, flanked by Assistant Editors Caitlyn Emily Wilcox and Graham Thomas Wilcox. This May 2023,…
I am currently working on a couple essays. A very positive one about The Caine Mutiny as a book, big screen movie, TV movie, stage play, and radio play. And a friend called the latest Hercule Poirot movie, A Haunting in Venice, “amazingly good.” That’s exactly the opposite of what it is. I’ll be expressing my disappointment with that one soon. I’ve already re-shared a couple of the excellent Pulp-related essays that were a part of Black Gate’s terrific Discovering…
Tales by Moonlight, volumes One and Two (Tor, January 1985 and July 1989). Covers by Mark E. Rogers and Jill Bauman Jessica Amanda Salmonson has produced only a handful of anthologies, but they are all highly regarded. Her first, Amazons!, won the World Fantasy Award in 1980, and the two Heroic Visions volumes she edited in the mid-80s are still enjoyed and discussed today, with an original Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser novella by Fritz Leiber, plus terrific sword and…
Moses Ose Utomi Moses Ose Utomi is a Nigerian American fantasy writer, who weaves his unique cultural heritage with the academic chops an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and a dash of the wandering martial artist, living extensively across the US (most recently Honolulu). His work has been published with Tor and Fantasy Magazine, among others, but his most successful work to date has been his debut novella, Lies of the Ajungo (which, I recently reviewed at Black…