Search Results for: book club

I Am Number Four: Why Movies Are Rarely As Good As Books

Comments 4 comments

I am in my mid-thirties and my wife is in her mid-twenties. The eight-year difference between us can be jarring at times, especially because I am a pop culture junkie and she grew up without cable television (and rarely watched the network television she did have access to, as I learned when I discovered she’d never seen an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard, even in rerun). Recently, this generation gap has became particularly evident. A close friend of hers…

Read More Read More

Excerpt from Star Soldier by Vaughn Heppner, Book 1 of the Doom Star Series

Comments 1 comment

Last month we reported that Black Gate author Vaughn Heppner had cracked the bestseller list at Amazon with Star Soldier, Book #1 of the Doom Star Series. Star Soldier and its sequels, Bio-Weapon and Battle Pod, now occupy the top three spots at Amazon’s bestseller list for Series Science Fiction in Kindle ebooks, — outselling Dune, Foundation, and many others. In the general Science Fiction Bestsellers list for Kindle editions, Star Soldier remains solidly at #2, where it’s been for nearly two months. Star…

Read More Read More

A Sword & Sorcery Series I Really Love: Flashing Swords!, edited by Lin Carter

Comments 17 comments

Flashing Swords! #2, 4, & 5 (Science Fiction Book Club, September 1973, May 1977, and December 1981). Covers by Frank Frazetta, Gary Viskupic, and Ron Miller It’s time to take a look at another Sword & Sorcery anthology series I really love: Flashing Swords, edited by Lin Carter. It is second in my affections only to the Swords Against Darkness 5-book series edited by Andy Offutt that I wrote about here last year. Flashing Swords! came out of the group…

Read More Read More

A Masterful Three Novella Original Anthology: The New Atlantis, edited by Robert Silverberg

Comments 5 comments

The New Atlantis (Warner Books paperback reprint, 1978). Cover by Lou Feck My latest look at a book from the 1970s treats a major anthology from 1975. The New Atlantis and Other Novellas collects three long stories: “Silhouette,” by Gene Wolfe; “The New Atlantis,” by Ursula K. Le Guin, and “A Momentary Taste of Being,” by James Tiptree, Jr. The project received plenty of notice at awards time – the book as a whole was fifth in the Locus Poll…

Read More Read More

Chess in Sword & Planet Fiction: The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Comments 23 comments

The Chessmen of Mars (Ace Books, December 1962). Cover by Roy Krenkel, Jr. Chess in Sword & Planet fiction: I learned the basic rules of chess in grade school and liked that it was a game that didn’t require luck. I didn’t do well at “luck!” The first adult I played was my brother-in-law, who rather gleefully mopped the floor with me. Out of resentment, I began to study and in our next game, probably when I was about 16, I…

Read More Read More

The World of Tiers and Beyond: Philip Jose Farmer, Part I

Comments 11 comments

The World of Tiers, Volumes 1 and 2 (Science Fiction Book Club, November 1981). Covers by Boris Vallejo Philip Jose Farmer (1918 – 2009). Farmer was a versatile writer. I discovered him from his Sword & Planet work with his World of Tiers series, but went on to read a lot of other books by him, including some pastiches he wrote in ERB’s universe. I’ll be discussing him here in two posts. My introduction to Farmer came through the Science…

Read More Read More

Janet Morris, May 25, 1946 – August 10, 2024

Comments 6 comments

High Couch of Silistra (Bantam Books, May 1977) and The Golden Sword (Baen, November 1984). Covers by Boris Vallejo and Victoria Poyser Just after I put up my first Harold Lamb post I found out that an author I much admired and who has influenced my work, had died. Janet Morris. I’ll get back to Lamb next post but wanted to take a moment to comment on Ms. Morris. I only wish I’d done this before she died. I knew…

Read More Read More

Lovely Ladies and Pleistocene Behemoths: A Visit to the Hollow Earth with Edgar Rice Burroughs

Comments 11 comments

Caroline Munro, and a pair of Pleistocene behemoths, in At the Earth’s Core I’ve had a lifelong fascination with “hollow earth” stories, a style of fantasy fiction that presents ancient, lost societies of people (and/or humanoids) living deep under the earth, where Jurassic and Pleistocene behemoths — as well as uncategorized horrors — struggle to survive in the subterranean jungles of a sunless world. My favorite of this genre is the Pellucidar series, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which began in…

Read More Read More

Andre Norton: Gateway to Magic, Part II

Comments 6 comments

Andre Norton’s two-book series Judgment on Janus and Victory on Janus (Fawcett Crest, December 1979 and January 1980). Covers by Ken Barr Part I of Andre Norton: Gateway to Magic is here. Two other fun books by Norton that I read between ages 12 and 16 were Judgment on Janus and Victory on Janus. In Judgement, a down and out young man named Naill Renfro ends up on the planet Janus, which is ruled by a group of religious fanatics…

Read More Read More

Love Exotic Science Fiction on Desert Planets? Try Donald Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite

Comments 4 comments

Courtship Rite (Timescape Books, July 1982). Cover by Rowena Morrill Noe took her strange Liethe in a comforting embrace. “Some of us make our Contribution to the Race through Death, and others of us make our Contribution to the Race through Life. That’s the way it has always been.” One of the distinctive pleasures of science fiction is the heterotopia — a story set not in a good place (a utopia) or an evil place (a dystopia) but in an…

Read More Read More