It was a brisk autumn afternoon in the grungy backstreets of Johannesburg.   Moving in fits and starts, a draft manuscript of Charles S...

Lightning-cracked time portals.   Secret tombs. Slave ship mutiny. Snake men.   Buried alive.   Parlays with kings.   These are just ...

I imagine it’s something of a minor surprise to readers of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea to finish the book wi...

Edgar Rice Burroughs genre milestone A Princess of Mars ended with the hero appropriately back on Earth where he’d begun his tale.  ...

A Princess of Mars (1912) by Edgar Rice Burroughs is one of the most over-the-top novels ever written.   Inspired by pulp and in tur...

Much of Golden Age science fiction is bound up in the pseudo-scientific, quasi fantastic renderings of heroic frontier stories set in...

I am agog.   Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1912 A Princess of Mars is a book I’d never read, that is, until turning the last page today—...

For those unaware, The Snow Queen is a fairy tale originally written by Hans Christian Anderson in 1845.   Possessing all the elemen...

I was going to post different review, but hearing of Jack Vance's passing this past week, I've decided to pay a small tribute...

In the early part of his career, and in an indirect sense throughout it, Roger Zelazny combed Earth’s cultures, religions, and legend...

Big Planet (1957) is Jack Vance’s third published novel.   Barely longer than a novella, the book nevertheless features many of the ...

Though certainly more well-known for his science fiction and fantasy, Jack Vance was also an avid mystery writer.   The crime genre i...

The 1980s found Jack Vance moving into his sixth decade of life.   Imagination still sharp, he produced such works as the Lyonesse t...

The Dragon Masters and The Last Castle are Jack Vance’s most famous novellas.   Falling short by just a hair, The Miracle Workers ...

Breaking into the sci-fi/fantasy market is relatively easy these days for authors uninterested in making readers think.   Experiencin...

It would be interesting to begin this review with the number of what-ifs Brian Aldiss based his novel Hothouse on, hyper-greenhouse e...