Karl Edward Wagner (1945 – 1994) is one writer I make a concerted effort to collect. I think I have almost his entire output, which is — unfortunately—not extensive. The man was a genius and I wish it was more. I met him briefly at a conference and corresponded with him some. He was only 48 when he died and that’s way too young. The first work I found by Wagner (KEW) were his Sword & Sorcery stories of Kane,…
So it was, but it is said that in recompense Mandos gave to Beren and to Lúthien thereafter a long span of life and joy, and they wandered knowing thirst nor cold in the fair land of Beleriand, and no mortal Man thereafter spoke to Beren or his spouse. from The Quenta Silmarillion When I wrote about The Silmarillion last year, without much detail, I described the story of Beren and Lúthien as the great love story of Middle-earth. Inspired…
The Barbarian Swordsmen (Star, 1981). Cover by Gino D’Achille The Barbarian Swordsmen, edited by Sean Richards, Star publishers, a British press, 1981, cool cover by Gino D’Achille. A collection of Sword & Sorcery (S&S) tales that likely wouldn’t exist except for Robert E. Howard. I couldn’t find out much about Mr. Richards but Toby Hooper revealed to me that Richards has been reported as a pseudonym for Peter Haining and that appears to be true. His intro here doesn’t reveal…
After what seems like strange aeons of dreaming about it, Mark Finn, Jason Waltz, and I (Adrian Simmons) have pulled the trigger on running an in-person Sword & Sorcery writing workshop. Added bonus, we’re holding it in the heart of S&S history, Cross Plains Texas, Robert E. Howard’s home during his days of creating characters like Conan, Soloman Kane, Brikenridge Elkins, El Borak, among others.
Tam Lin (Tor Books paperback reprint edition, April 1992). Cover by Thomas Canty There’s been a lot of genre fiction set at schools. Hogwarts is an obvious example, but such settings were around long before Harry Potter; Heinlein’s Space Cadet, The Uncanny X-Men, and Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea were all there first. Tam Lin is another early example, published six years before Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone made scholastic fantasy a best-selling subgenre. But it has an…
The January-February issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Cover art by Tithi Luadthong and Dominic Harman We’ve settled into a new reality with Analog and Asimov’s SF. Both magazines are consistently running more than two months late, but both are at least on a predictable schedule, arriving regularly in two-month intervals. Readers more observant than I have pointed out that the publisher, Must Read Magazines, has removed the cover date and Next Issue date from…
I LOVE the movie, Eddie and the Cruisers. I’ve seen the flick, about a short-lived Jersey bar band, at least a dozen times. And it’s got a terrific soundtrack by John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown band. I like Cafferty more than I do the much more famous Bruce Springsteen, who he kinda sounds like. To each their own. Eddie and the Cruisers was the #110 box office film of 1983. With a budget of $5 million, its domestic gross…
Theodora McCormick was born on September 14, 1890 in Brooklyn, New York. Her father died when she was a year old and she was raised by her mother and stepfather. She attended the Barnard School for Girls in Manhattan and the Halsted School in Yonkers. Although she wanted to attend Vassar College and was accepted in 1909, her parents did not support her attending the school. Her plans to go anyway were dashed when she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and…
Eric Temple Bell was born in Aberdeen, Scotland on February 7, 1883, but when he was fifteen months old, his family moved to San Jose, California. After his father’s death in January 1896, the family moved back to the United Kingdom, settling in Bedford, England. Bell was educated at Bedford Modern School, where his was inspired to study mathematics by Edward Mann Langley. He attended college at the University of London for a year before transferring to Stanford University, from…
I am gut punched to hear that author James Sallis (December 1944 – January 27, 2026) has died. James was the closest thing to a writing mentor I had. He was a friend, and certainly one of the most talented writers I’ve ever known. He lived in New Orleans when I moved there and I met him at a book signing. Though he was already pretty famous in literary circles, he was incredibly down to earth, and he invited me…