I mentioned a few weeks back that the infamous Eye of Argon has had some expansion added to it recently. There was Grignyr the Ecordian, a edited re-telling of the original, and there was The Eye of Argon and the Further Adventures of Grignr the Barbarian. Post-holidays, I acquired both. The guy who wrote this… Read More Cry of Argon: Reports from the Grignr Mythos
The most recent Shallow & Pedantic Podcast was a two-parter on The Eye of Argon, famously the Worst Fantasy Story of All Time. We read the story, and we talked about it. In the first part, we laughed long and loudly at the madness of the story, its logorrheac prose combined with its dearth of… Read More Poking the Eye of Argon
I don’t mean to be a Tolkien fanboy here, but I am tired of Twitter dorks with shallow intellects and electronic-addled minds pretending that they have anything useful to say. To be fair, Tolkien’s influence on the genre can be a touch overrated, and can lead to people ignoring other seminal writers. I myself only… Read More Everyone Who Says Fellowship of the Ring is Boring Should Go Back to Reading Books With Pictures
I had forgotten that Wheel of Time was being made into a TV Series by Amazon. I assume it’s going to be lame and full of “epic” tropes, so I probably won’t watch it. If it’s as good as Witcher, I will count that success. Long before I was disappointed in George R.R. Martin, I… Read More The Wheel Keeps on Spinning: Robert Jordan, Prologues and World-Building
As promised. This is the first of our paid issues since the first volume of the magazine back in 2015. It’s the same price as what you would pay on Gumroad. (if you subscribe to our Patreon, you get it even cheaper). Above is the July Issue, Below is the October. Next Issue comes out… Read More Unnamed Journal on Amazon
In my wild opinionated youth, I was something of a disdainer. Where other readers and writers widely explored what certain genres had to offer; I tended to stick with the first thing that brought me in the door. I liked Star Wars, and never found another sci-fi world that interested me until I read Heinlein.… Read More Entertainment vs. Edutainment: The New Pulp Narrative
As you can see from the episode list, this is our longest episode to date. We ramble along quite nicely, thanks to some excellent porter, and give Stephen Brust and Fritz Leiber some shout-outs for being creative, witty worldbuilders and writers. We’re also up on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Deezer, and YouTube, with iHeartRadio… Read More New Shallow & Pedantic Podcast: Brust & Leiber
No, I’m not going to write about the Riots or the Election or the Virus or any of that stuff everyone’s already right about and mad about. Go infect your brain with Twitter if you want to read the latest hot takes. I have other things to think about. Specifically, I want to write about… Read More I Should Care About Witcher But I Don’t.
There’s an entire subculture of fantasy map-making and world-building, because Tolkein and Gygax together hammered into the genre of epic fantasy literature and gaming the need for a world to have an all-encompassing backstory, including a theogyny. I’ve been farting around with a fantasy world of my own devising, known as Cevalon, since I was… Read More Fantasy Maps and Cevalon
If you define fantasy as “a story that cannot occur in the real world”, as this web site does, then you can include sci-fi in that, as sci-fi takes places in worlds unseen and with technology uninvented, and any technology sufficiently advanced functions more or less like magic in the minds of many people. But… Read More Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Space Opera
Content Blues 