The Starry Wisdom : A Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft
The Starry Wisdom A Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft Edited by D. M. Mitchell An Occasional Look at Lovecraftian Anthologies: 8 Do you like wallowing in other people’s shit? No, I’m serious. Is your particular satisfaction based on getting right down there and rolling around in the excreted waste of others? Or reading loving descriptions of the same? How about descriptions of male and female genitalia so extreme that they are more...
Hours of the Dragon The Weird Works of Robert E. Howard, Volume 8
Hours of the Dragon The Weird Works of Robert E. Howard, Volume 8 Edited by Paul Herman These ongoing pieces are overviews rather than reviews and therefore contain spoilers galore. When you take a moment to think about it, in the half-a-dozen or so years after 1928, between them Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Robert Ervin Howard changed the very face of horror/fantasy writing – and the reverberations...
Beyond the Black River – The Weird Works of Robert E. Howard, Volume 7 – Pt 2
Beyond the Black River The Weird Works of Robert E. Howard, Volume 7 Edited by Paul Herman Part Two These ongoing pieces are overviews rather than reviews and therefore contain spoilers galore The first two-thirds of this seventh volume contained two pretty naff Howard pieces — and one stone cold masterpiece in the shape of the title story. Unfortunately, since the remaining two consisted of an oddity and a run-of-the-mill...
Return to Lovecraft Country
Return to Lovecraft Country 15 Frightening Forays into the Lovecraftian Landscape An Occasional Look at Lovecraftian Anthologies: 7 Hmmm… ‘Return to Lovecraft Country?’ I’m not quite sure that I’ve ever left it for long. Well, perhaps for as much as a year at a stretch. But forty-five years ago a boy of twelve walked through an angle that made no sense in the physics of this world and emerged onto a landscape where everything...
Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot
Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot “To you, a robot is a robot. Gears and metal, electricity and positrons. —- Mind and iron! Human-made! If necessary, human-destroyed! But you haven’t worked with them, so you don’t know them. They’re a cleaner, better breed than we are.” Susan Calvin On the back cover of the edition I’m holding in my little claws –HarperVoyager 2013, since you ask – the blurb simply gives Asimov’s famous...
Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers
Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers So. That was Starship Troopers; and that is what all the fuss has been about. Now I can see why controversy has followed this science-fiction novel for so long. Is it fascist? Yes, I guess it is to a degree; but it argues its case quite well. Is it a celebration of the army and all things militaristic? Oh, most definitely. But even for someone like myself, who simply hates orders of...
Recent Comments