A Date With Superman

A Date With Superman

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Good afterevenmorn, Readers! And also watchers, this case.

It’s been a bit of a rough time for me of late and so, deciding that staying home and moping was not going to help me at all, I took myself out on a date. I went to the movies to watch the newest Superman. I loved the movie, but I’m not here to provide an in-depth review, rather, I’d like to reflect on the core of the character of James Gunn’s Superman and how it was, surprisingly, precisely what my heart needed in this moment.

Let me go pour myself a whiskey and settle in.

Okay. I’m good. Let’s go.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Western Noir: Anson Mount & Hell on Wheels

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Western Noir: Anson Mount & Hell on Wheels

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.”

– Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.

Hard to believe it’s been almost fifteen years since AMC debuted a gritty new western, Hell on Wheels. In November of 2011, Justified had completed two seasons, and suddenly I had two favorite shows. Back then television shows aired weekly, not in multiple episode ‘drops.’ and they weren’t available on-demand. You watched them when they aired or recorded them on your DVR. I would actually sit and watch both those shows every week, ‘live.’

MILD SPOILERS

I’m not gonna blatantly drop stuff, but don’t get mad if you can infer something from this post. The show’s been out there for fifteen years. Go watch it!

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Post Oaks and Sand Roughs: A first trek to Howard Days

Post Oaks and Sand Roughs: A first trek to Howard Days

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The Howard Home in Cross Plains, Texas, home of Howard Days 2025

I’m two hours out from Cross Plains, Texas, and my thoughts are, much like the proceeding 20 hours, ruminating over the pair of fantasy authors named Howard that died far too young that led me on this trek.

I’m on my way to Howard Days 2025, the two-day celebration of the life and work of the godfather of sword-and-sorcery himself, Robert E. Howard. It’s been mecca for his fans and successors for almost four decades, and every sword-and-sorcery devotee I know hopes to make pilgrimage at least once.

The other is Howard Andrew Jones, who passed away from cancer this past January, and whose absence still festers like an open wound. Recently, it’s because we’d made plans to both attend our first Howard Days last year, and I’d had to pull out at the last moment. He’s described it as a spiritual experience, and I promised to meet him back this year at Howard Days this year. I don’t give oaths to lightly, or break promises to friends.

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Monster Mayhem, Part II

Monster Mayhem, Part II

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Grizzly (Columbia Pictures, May 16, 1976) and The White Buffalo (United Artists, May 6, 19779)

Grizzly (1976)

Following the 1975 movie phenomenon about a hungry fish, a bunch of large animal flicks reared their heads in an effort to take a bite out of the box office.

One of them was Grizzly, a tale as old as time about an 18ft prehistoric bear that develops a taste for campers and rangers. One man tries to warn everyone, is shot down by the authorities, and recruits some specialists to help hunt it down. Yes, Grizzy was indeed compared unfavorably to Jaws, and rightly so, but I still love it.

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Tor Double #15: Jack Vance’s The Last Castle and Robert Silverberg’s Nightwings

Tor Double #15: Jack Vance’s The Last Castle and Robert Silverberg’s Nightwings

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Cover for The Last Castle by Brian Waugh
Cover for Nightwings by Mark Ferrari

The Last Castle was originally published in Galaxy in April, 1966. It won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. The Last Castle is the first of two Jack Vance stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series.

The Last Castle is set on a future Earth that humans have abandoned and later returned to. With their return, they brought a civilization which was based on a strong caste system Gentlemen were humans who lived in the castles which were established across the planets. Other humans, Nomads and Expiationists, lived outside the castles and were viewed as barely more than animals. Serving the Gentlemen in the castles were the Peasants, Phanes, Birds, and Mek, various races which were brought back to Earth with the humans in order to perform certain tasks.

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Goth Chick News: Fear Dome Las Vegas is Gambling on Our Nightmares

Goth Chick News: Fear Dome Las Vegas is Gambling on Our Nightmares

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We are so here for this news.

As you may or may not have noticed, recent years have seen Sin City embracing the era of mega, year-round haunted attractions, and the newest, Fear Dome, is here to stake its claim.

Following Universal’s lead with Universal Horror Unleashed, a permanent 110,000 ft² horror experience set to debut this August at Area15 in Las Vegas and another planned for Chicago in 2027, the trend is clear: immersive horror is evolving beyond seasonal frights into full-blown entertainment districts. Long-running events, from Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights to pop-up mazes, are giving way to permanent monstrosities like Los Angeles Haunted Hayride, and these “horror parks” are meant to terrify year-round.

If there’s one thing we here at Goth Chick News appreciate, it’s an over-the-top haunted attraction. And if said attraction also happens to be housed inside a massive, blacked-out inflatable dome that looks like it crash-landed from a Cenobite dimension? Well, sign us up and take our money.

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A Blurb Reader’s Bill of Rights

A Blurb Reader’s Bill of Rights

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I don’t know anything about the amount or quality of your reading. You might read quickly or slowly. You might be a sprinter who favors short stories or a marathoner who fearlessly commits to one multivolume series after another. You might read one book at a time or you might be the kind of degenerate who always has half a dozen going. You might read six books a year or sixty.

Whatever the nature of your reading life, though, I’ll bet that over the course of that life, you’ve read enough blurbs to make a volume as hefty as War and Peace (my copy of which does not bear a blurb. What would it even be? “If you liked Norm MacDonald’s Moth Joke, you’ll love this!” — Conan O’Brien”? It would be interesting to figure out just how long an author has to be around before blurbs are no longer considered necessary, but that’s a conundrum for another day.)

For readers, blurbs are a fact of life. They can be helpful, like a considerate stranger who gives you directions in a strange city, and they can be annoying, like mosquitoes or those people who keep calling me, offering to buy my house, and I don’t want to sell my house!

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The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part V: Lin Carter

The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part V: Lin Carter

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Lin Carter’s Under the Green Sun series (DAW Books)

I consider Edgar Rice Burroughs and Otis Adelbert Kline to be the first generation of Sword & Planet authors. Probably most widely known among the second generation — whether rightly or wrongly — is Lin Carter. Carter was an enthusiastic fellow who loved all things fantasy, including S&P and Sword & Sorcery. He promoted the genres, edited many collections of fantasy stories, and was a tremendously prolific author himself.

I’ve read 41 books by him and still have about a dozen on my TBR shelves. And that’s NOT counting the Conan books he was associated with. He was everywhere when I was growing up and our small town library had more books by him than by ERB himself.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hardboiled Gaming – L.A. Noire

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hardboiled Gaming – L.A. Noire

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.”

– Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.

Grand Theft Auto has been a hugely successful video game franchise for almost thirty years. From Rockstar Games, I’ve never played it. They also make Red Dead Redemption, which I tinkered with a little. It’s pretty high quality and I’ll get to it some day. Among their other titles, the one I have jumped into is L.A. Noire.

Set in 1947, you are Cole Phelps, an LAPD uniformed patrolman, and a WW II Marine veteran. You are assigned cases, and you go to scenes, collect clues, and talk to people. The goal, of course, is to collect enough information to catch the culprit. It’s open-world, but the path to solving a case is rather straightforward. I’ve only failed once so far, and it was clearly trying to tell me what I was missing, but I couldn’t pick up on it. I’m currently assigned to the Traffic division, which is way more than going out for fender benders.

There are also regular side quests which come in as radio calls. You can take the call and go take care of it. This often involves chases and shootings.

I have killed quite a few folks so far. It is frowned upon if you shoot someone that didn’t need shooting. But I’ve been killed (you restart the mission), so it can get tough out there for your and your partner.

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Daughter of DAW: An Interview with Publisher Betsy Wollheim, Part II

Daughter of DAW: An Interview with Publisher Betsy Wollheim, Part II

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Betsy Wollheim at Worldcon 75

This interview was transcribed from a Zoom meeting of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society on June 14, 2024, conducted by Darrell Schweitzer and hosted by Miriam Seidel.

Read Part I here.

Darrell Schweitzer: The other factor that must go into accepting a book for publication is that the editor has to see how the company can make money off the book. I have heard of books being turned down with a response, “This is perfectly charming, but I don’t see how we can publish it profitably.”

Betsy Wollheim: Usually a publisher has a few really big authors, so they can afford to publish a book that is brilliant, but may not be commercial. That was really my father’s attitude toward the Gor books. Ironically, John Norman enabled him to publish Suzette Haden Elgin, a feminist author. Patrick Rothfuss sells a lot of books — he’s an outstanding writer and his sales enable us to publish books that might not sell that well, which is lovely.

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