Cynical-C Blog (Free subscription) | 07/09/2008
Oldtime Radio X-Minus One "A Gun for Dinosaur" Part One.A safari into the Cretaceous to hunt for Tyrannosaurus Rex is endangered by a reckless glory hound, whose ineptitude and arrogance are matched only by his capacity for murder. Story by L. Sprague de Camp Part 2 is here.
Canadian Cynic (Free subscription) | 03/05/2008
Memed again! Mr. Bow, James Bow has tagged the house of cynic with the books meme. I shall give it a go. (1) How many books do you own? (And where do you store them all) Me love books. And like Mr. Bow, I'm not about to spend the next several hours counting them. I have plenty of books. Book on top of books, tucked in shelves, piled on tables, stashed in my carry bags and pretty much everywhere I am...
io9 (Free subscription) | 03/04/2008
Gary Gygax, co-inventor of Dungeons and Dragons, will probably be best remembered as the man who brought role playing games into the lives of millions of teenagers in the 1970s, and who helped spawn... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
SF Signal (Free subscription) | 02/28/2008
From the Science Fiction Writers of America : The SFWA® Board of Directors and President Michael Capobianco are pleased to announce that writer and editor Michael Moorcock has been named Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master for 2008. The Grand Master represents SFWA's highest accolade and recognizes excellence for a lifetime of contributions to the genres of science fiction and fantasy. Mr. Moorcock...
Dr. Frank's What's-it (Free subscription) | 01/19/2008
Along with Patty Hearst, Pete Shelley, Yog Sothoth, L. Sprague de Camp, and Radagast the Brown, this guy was a major touchstone/icon/bugbear of my childhood, such as it was, so, even though he went insane in the end: pax tecum....
TexasBestGrok (Free subscription) | 12/06/2007
Balefires; David Drake (Night Shade Books, 2007, ISBN 978-1-59780-071-6, cover by Richard Pellegrino). It wasn't until this year that I discovered that David Drake wrote...
Workbench (Free subscription) | 12/04/2007
On Tuesday, the Yahoo Groups mailing list devoted to the late fantasy novelist L. Sprague de Camp failed to note the 100th anniversary of his birth. This unconscionable slight has inspired Leo Grin, editor of the Robert E. Howard literary journal The Cimmerian , to take up his metaphorical two-handed battle axe and go medieval on their asses: ... not since I quit the board of The Dark Man in December...
Jeff the Baptist (Free subscription) | 11/29/2007
Instapundit notes that L. Sprague de Camp's 100th birthday was the 27th and The Cimmerian laments even his fans didn't notice. Frankly, I'm not a de Camp fan. I'll haven't read much of his fiction except the Conan pastiches and I consider them inferior to Howard's original work. His non-fiction works are interesting, but tend to be marred by the character of their author. While Instapundit
Dumb Looks Still Free (Free subscription) | 09/10/2007
I do like it when public figures put out books on alternate history and then venture forth to offer 'alternative timelines' on things. Really! It's fun! Latest is Newt Gingrich offering *his* alternate history on 'the war on terror', as reported on by David Freddoso at NRO . One of the great joys in my SF reading has been alt-history from H. Beam Piper's Paratime works (especially Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen...
TexasBestGrok (Free subscription) | 05/24/2007
(2004 winds up!) Astounding Stories: The 60th Anniversary Collection; edited by James Gunn (Easton Press, 1990). Three volumes, introductions by Poul Anderson (black cover volume),...
Overcoming Bias (Free subscription) | 04/27/2007
In L. Sprague de Camp's fantasy story The Incomplete Enchanter (which set the mold for the many imitations that followed), the hero, Harold Shea, is transported from our own universe into the universe of Norse mythology. This world is based...
PaperBackSwap.com (Free subscription) | 04/20/2007
The saga of Recluce, launched in The Magic of Recluce and continuing in The Towers of the Sunset and The Magic Engineer reaches a new climax in The Order War . "Modesitt has created an exceptionally vivid world," says L. Sprague de Camp, "so concretely visualized as to give the impression that Modesitt himself must have dwelt there." Publishers Weekly says, "Modesitt creates a complex world bgased...
Science Fiction Book Club (Free subscription) | 04/16/2007
Entertainment Weekly's April 20th issue has a review of Greg Bear's Quantico (first published in the US by the SFBC a year ago) and capsule reviews of Jim Butcher's White Night (also available in the SFBC omnibus Wizard Under Fire),...
The Eternal Golden Braid (Free subscription) | 03/29/2007
Astounding Stories of Super Science Astounding Stories: The 60th Anniversary Collection ; edited by James Gunn (Easton Press, 1990). Three volumes, introductions by Poul Anderson (black cover volume), Stanley Schmidt (red cover volume) and Isaac Asimov (blue cover volume). Much of my short story reading for the year came from multi-author collections. I also read a number of magazines (which will be...
The Reading Diary of John Dupuis (Free subscription) | 03/07/2007
What do you care what I read in 1987? Nothing, of course, but I do. As I get older (I was 20 in 1983 when I started keeping track of the books I read) I find myself more and more in the position of looking at a stack of books on my shelves by, say, Cornell Woolrich and they all have the word "Black" in the title. I know I've read a couple but I can't remember which ones. Fortunately, I've been maintaining...
