A series that I wanted but had a difficult time getting was the Berserker series by Chris Carlsen. There are three books, all from Sphere Books, published in 1977, 1977, & 1979 respectively. I finally got the last one and just finished reading it. The series is: 1. Shadow of the Wolf (August 1977) 2. The Bull Chief (October 1977) 3. The Horned Warrior (1979) ISFDB lists Melvyn Grant as the cover artist on #1 and 3, and I’m pretty…
James Silke (1931 – ) is something of a renaissance man in the arts. He’s a visual artist and prose writer, a set and costume designer, photographer, and comic book guy. Most people who I meet recognize him as a comic artist/writer, although I’ve never read any of his graphic stuff. I’ve seen a few of the movies he’s worked on, including King Solomon’s Mines and The Barbarians. My only experience with Silke’s writing is the four Sword & Sorcery…
Frequent guest columnist, New Pulp maven Will Murray, is back with more speculation: this time linking about the two biggest names in Pulp. Was Dashiell Hammett a Lester Dent fan? Well, let’s find out! The so-called Pulp Jungle, as Frank Gruber once called it, was a densely populated wonderland, at least insofar the greatest concentration of pulp magazine writers lived in or in close proximity to New York City, where most of the publishers were established. Late in life, Theodore…
The Children of Llyr (Ballantine Adult Fantasy #33, August 1971). Cover by David Johnston This latest entry in my series of essays about mostly obscure SF and Fantasy from the ’70s and ’80s looks at a novel published in one of the most celebrated publishing series of the early ’70s. This was the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, which ran from 1969 to 1974, under the editorship of Betty Ballantine, with the assistance of “Editorial Consultant” Lin Carter. I’ve discussed Carter’s…
Today, we come back from our excursion into the realm of Space Opera to our home territory of Sword & Planet fiction. One of the most unique S&P series I’ve ever encountered is the four-book series by Jack Vance (1916 – 2013) generally called the Planet of Adventure series. The stories take place on a planet called Tschai, and feature an earthman named Adam Reith. In a future in which Earth has starships, a distress signal comes from Tschai, which…
And we are wrapping up Cimmerian September. Which I think will be an annul thing here at Black Gate. Maybe I’ll do a broader Robert E. Howard month around his birth (January) or death (June). But it’s more Conan this week. If you’re a regular here, you know that I post almost exclusively positive stuff. You can go anywhere on social media for negative stuff. I like to share things I like – with people who wanna comment on it…
It’s Cimmerian September! Youtuber extraordinaire Michael K. Vaughn coined the term, in which he spends the month talking about my second favorite writer, Robert E. Howard (John D. MacDonald still holds the top spot). He’s going beyond Conan this year, and is starting out with my favorite Howard character, El Borak! A month celebrating REH is the best thing I can think of. John Bullard of the Robert E. Howard Foundation invited me to join a panel with Michael, John…
Last week, I talked about the most recent audiobooks I’ve been listening to. After enjoying the Egil & Nix short story, two more Thieves World books, and finishing The Black Company again, I wanted more S&S. I have a Kothar book, but it’s an AI voice. Meh. So, I am listening to volume one of the Elric saga. Which I have read many times. Man – those stories are still terrific. I’ve been watching a lot of movies and shows…
Having finished the first 100 issues of Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian, I did a post last week on Roy Thomas’s memoirs and that series. Which OF COURSE you read, here. I started reading the first Savage Sword of Conan Omnibus from Marvel, but I’m still in a CtB mood. So, I decided to write another post about it. Sort of… The first issue of Conan the Barbarian actually followed the sandalled feet of Starr the Slayer. Just for fun, Roy…
So, back in January of 2022, I did a post on Roy Thomas and the Marvel Conan comic he created in the seventies. I never read that comic. But for some reason in 2019, I decided to buy the first of what turned out to be his three memoirs about the series (mostly about the first 115 issues, which constituted his first run with Conan), and also one of the Marvel Omnibuses that had been put out recently. I ended…