Search Results for: Stephen Fabian

Swords & Sorcery Gold from a Master of Horror: Far Away & Never by Ramsey Campbell

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Ramsey Campbell is considered one of the most important and skilled writers of horror fiction. His earliest stories, Lovecraft pastiches, were collected and published by Arkham House as The Inhabitants of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964) when he was only eighteen. Within a few years he was routinely being nominated for, and often winning, various major awards for his original works of contemporary horror such as The Doll Who Ate His Mother (1976) and The Parasite (1980). He…

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When Stellar Empires Clash: GDW’s Dark Nebula and Imperium

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In this new Golden Age of science fiction and fantasy board games, when all the chatter is about the latest and greatest mega-games (when it isn’t about the big Fantasy Flight Holiday Sale), I’d like to take a moment to appreciate two classic games of interstellar combat: GDW’s Imperium and Dark Nebula, originally published in 1977 and 1980. Both may appear simplistic compared to modern games of empire-building in space, like Eclipse, EVE Conquests, or Empires of the Void. At first glance, they may…

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Vintage Treasures: Weird Tales #290

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I’m still unpacking all the treasures I brought home from the 2014 Windy City Pulp & Paper show in April. Although, as my wife Alice points out, things would go a little faster if I didn’t fondle everything for 20 minutes. I found the artifact at right buried in a box of magazines and fanzines from the 70s and 80s I acquired at the show. It’s the 290th issue of Weird Tales, covered dated Spring 1988 — the Sixty-Fifth Anniversary issue,…

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Tales From Windy City Pulp and Paper

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This coming weekend, Friday April 25th through Sunday April 27th, is Doug Ellis’s magnificent celebration of all things pulp, the Windy City Pulp and Paperback Convention here in Chicago, in nearby Lombard, Illinois. Windy City is one of my favorite local cons. I’ve written about it before, and in fact I’ve been attending the show for around 10 years. 2012 was perhaps the most successful show in some years, considering I returned with a fabulous assortment of mint-condition fantasy and science fiction paperbacks from the collection of…

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Art of the Genre: Artistic Melancholia for the Ruins of the Cyber World

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Not to go all ‘Goth Chick’ on you, but have you ever walked in a graveyard? If your answer is no, I’d put money says that you have but you just didn’t realize it. You see, the internet is really a reflection of our own world, with vibrant and glowing real-estate all along the information super highway. Now if you consider each dedicated website as a ‘town’ along this course, what happens when the site goes dormant? I would like…

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Echoes of the Goddess: Schweitzer’s Newest Classic

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Imagine a golden treasure chest filled to overflowing with rare and sparkling jewels. Now imagine the literary equivalent of that bounty: The jewels are visions of a fantastic world filled with dark magic, dead gods, and exotic cultures. The latest book from Darrell Schweitzer is a treasury of obscure tales woven into a single, epic tapestry of high fantasy. Echoes of the Goddess collects eleven stories set in the same weird world as Schweitzer’s second novel The Shattered Goddess (1982)….

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Art of the Genre: The Basic D&D Gazetteer

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At some point in my distant past I fell in love with something I didn’t have. I suppose it happens a lot to gamers, especially with younger folk and those who grew up before the advent of the internet. In days now long gone, I would flip through a Dragon Magazine and marvel at all the titles I found available in the advertisements. How many times have I kicked myself for not being able to lay hands on a copy…

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SIR JULIAN THE APOSTATE: Doomed Knight, Tragic Hero

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Swords Against Darkness. Heroic Fantasy. The Year’s Best Horror Stories. Distant Worlds. Alien Worlds. Void. What sword-slinging hero appeared in all of these anthologies and magazines (and more) before his adventures were collected into a single impressive volume? The answer is Sir Julian the Apostate, a knight fallen from grace, and as doomed a hero as you’ll find in the history of sword-and-sorcery fiction. For swashbuckling fantasy as dark and seductive as a vampiric lamia, look no further than the…

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Art of the Genre: Top 10 Fantasy Artists of the Past 100 Years

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So as it often happens here a BG L.A., John O’Neill issues a challenge and then we beat writers have to find a way to make it happen [Ok, so that only me and Ryan, but still]. John was looking over stories that got good hits from various sites around the internet and then phones me to say that I should do a piece on ‘Top 10s’ because people seem to really like top ten lists. Ok, so after hanging…

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Haunted Trucks, Ghostly Theaters, and Creepy Picnics: The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

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The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII (DAW, November 1984). Cover by Vicente Segrelles The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII was the twelfth volume in the DAW Year’s Best Horror series and the fifth edited by the great Karl Edward Wagner (1945–1994). The book was copyrighted and printed in 1984. After nine covers by Michael Whelan, we have a new cover artist, the Spanish artist Vicente Segrelles (1940–). I think this is a frightening cover and less fantastic than…

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