REVIEW: Zombieland, The Series
Once in awhile, something wonderful happens. A great movie gets new life, in the form of a sequel. Take, for example, my personal favorite, Predator. Oh, sure it’s got lots of flaws, but it’s like […]
Read More
Crossroads: Tensions between SF/F and Mainstream Literary Fiction
Welcome to the first week of May! This month, I’m going to be taking a look at the often-fraught relationship between speculative fiction and mainstream literary fiction. I’ve always found the love-hate relationship between devotees […]
Growing Your Own Space Garden
Explaining Starseed Pilgrim, an Independent Games Festival winner about building a garden in space, is both incredibly easy and nightmarishly complex. At its heart, you float around on flying gardens, plant seeds that produce pleasant […]
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Part 1
To be a comic fan and aficionado there are two stories that you have to appreciate, understand, grasp, and love: ‘Watchmen’ and ‘The Dark Knight Returns’. Both products of the late 80s they are the […]
What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?
Why don’t American kids dream of being astronauts anymore? In Japan, interest in space is at a historically high level. I get slightly snarky about AKB48.
Sequential Wednesdays #11 – The Quiet Majesty of Kazu Kibuishi
Out in the world of beautiful stories, digital art, and ironclad contracts with Scholastic exists a beautiful man, in every sense of the word, named Kazu Kibuishi. For years, Kazu has worked on, collected, and […]
Could Defiance Be The Next Firefly?
I decided to watch Defiance after a recommendation from fellow Amazing Stories blogger, Geoff Wakeling. I’d seen the posters on the side of buses for the show, but the fact that it was followed by […]
Top Ten Best Star Wars Computer Games of All Time
Pull the blinds and turn off the phone, it’s time to head to the Game Room and lock in on some hardcore meta-gaming action. In the Game Room we will explore the world of gaming […]
The Art of the IAAA: David A. Hardy – The King of Space Art
Today we begin a new bi-weekly feature that introduces the art and history of the members of the International Association of Astronomical Artists (IAAA), a group of artists who have as their collective forte the […]
Amazing Stories Top Posts of April 2013
More Sci Fi Shows To Hit Screens in 2013 Interview With A Wizard: Mike Top Ten RPG Game Systems of All Time Jack Vance Visions of a Dying Earth A Way To End Ebook Piracy […]
Demystifying the Synopsis
A synopsis is a larger version of the book jacket blurb you see on the back of most paperbacks in the bookstore. You write a synopsis for the same reason: to sell a story idea […]
How American Airlines Helped Me Gafiate
Gafiate, for those whose Fannish Lexicon isn’t handy, is Fan Speak for the act of ‘Getting Away From It All’. Leaving Fandom. Putting conventions and fanzines and crazy projects and far-flung friends behind you. It […]
Characters: Malcolm Reynolds of Firefly
Let’s talk about Firefly. Remember Firefly everyone? That show we all love? The one FOX cancelled? The one about the scrappy band of space cowboys by the guy who did The Avengers? Hell yeah. Let’s […]
Review: The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
I can’t think of a better novel to start my exploration of steampunk then The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. This award-winning novel, written by two controversial authors has been on my radar for […]
H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival & CthuluCon Happening This Weekend In Portland!
For many years, if you wanted to see the works of Howard Philips Lovecraft adapted for the big screen, one would have to have to content one’s self with endlessly re-watching The Bride Of Re-Animator […]
Camp NaNoWriMo the First (2013): Lessons Learned
In just under thirty days I have written over sixty thousand words on two projects and started a third. This is a personal best for me but proves that if you put your mind to […]
I am a Reader
Before I was a writer, I was a reader. My mother tells me I’ve been reading since I was four, and I accept that, because I don’t remember a time when I couldn’t read. By […]
A Review of Writing Fantasy Heroes
Writing Fantasy Heroes Jason M. Waltz, ed. Rogue Blades Entertainment trade paper, $14.99, ebook $ 7.99 Kindle (There is no other electronic version available that I’m aware of.) Okay, class, today we’re going to have […]
Atlanta Nights: A good, bad example.
Science Fiction authors have frequently felt that their genre was treated badly by publishers. When PublishAmerica wrote on its own web site that [SF and fantasy writers] have no clue about what it is to […]
The Last Bookshop by Richard Dadd & Dan Fryer
“There have always been stories. Ever since the earliest days.” Once in a while, I like to be reminded that the future is pretty from where we’re sitting, the present endlessly dull, but the past […]
Art in Action: A Bakuman Review
I spend a lot of time lately complaining about the state of anime and the series that have been created within the last five or so years. In the course of this tirade, shounen manga […]
Open Source Horror: The Slender Man
In his terrific monograph, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, French novelist Michel Houellebecq proposes that Lovecraft differs from virtually all fiction writers before and after him because his work constitutes a founding […]
The Beautiful Tiny Worlds of Animated Music Videos
Music videos are a strange amalgamation of variant creative forces merging together, all too often used to further market or popularize a song with flamboyant budgets, unnecessary celebrity appearances and overall lame concepts. For […]
From the In Box 4/28/13
Tony C Smith from StarshipSofa sent along the following: Live Video Writers Workshop with Mike Resnick and Paul Di Filippo 16th June 2013 UK Greenwich Mean Time 17:00 Eastern Standard Time (EST) 12:00 Central […]
50 Shades of Self-publishing
Okay, so maybe there aren’t fifty shades, but I’ve yet to do a “50-shades of gray” take-off in a blog post so this seemed like a good time to play that card. The fact is […]
The Artful Collector: Why isn’t There a More Active Market in What I Collect?
A common thread of discussion for collectors who buy art from me, and which runs through many sites dealing with collectibles, concerns the factors that make certain types of “X” (coins, stamps, comics, art, etc) […]
No. 14 Marion Zimmer Bradley, Darkover, and the Sexual Identity of Telepaths.
Bradley made her first sale as an adjunct to an amateur fiction contest in Amazing Stories in 1949 with the short story “Outpost“, which was published in Amazing Stories Vol. 23, No. 12, the December […]
Iron Man 3 Has Arrived At Last!
The 2013 comic book season has finally arrived and lucky for me the UK is one of the first countries getting a first taste of the Marvel movies again. Today saw Tony Stark return to […]
Anime roundup 4/28/2013: Tribal knowledge
Hunter x Hunter #76 – Hunter x Hunter was previously adapted for TV in 1998-1999 for a series that ran to the middle of the Yorknew City arc and stopped. Various direct-to-video continuations (none of […]
About Author
Latest Posts
Recent Comments