Skip to main content

Sweepstakes Winner and Possible Return of a Sci Fi Pulp Magazine

I hope everybody had a far out Halloween! I know I did. It started with a trip to Empire Comics Vault in Sacramento where they had a Halloween mini con and a big sale to go with the occasion. Unfortunately, I got there too late for the con, which only lasted until 3 PM. But the sale was still going, including the free comics they were giving away which I definitely took advantage of both yet without going much over five dollars. In the evening I attended a family Halloween party and then came home and watched Dr. Terror’s House of Horror, starring Christopher Lee, on a VHS tape I bought at a con several years ago. And, of course, not long after the clock struck the witching hour, I looked up the winner of the sweepstakes who was selected by good ol’ Rafflecopter.

And the Winner Is . . .

. . . Alex Cavanaugh! I, again, congratulate Alex. He receives a book package consisting of novels The Queen of Darkness by Miguel Conner and Blood Moon by M.R. Sellars, plus a signed copy of The Fool’s Illusion  by yours truly. I’d like to once again thank Alex for his participation, and I thank everybody else who participated in the sweepstakes. I hope all of you will participate in future giveaways here at the Fantastic Site.

Possible Relaunch of a Classic SF Mag

You may have heard all over sci fi news that Bryan Fuller, executive producer of TV’s Hannibal, plans to relaunch the 1980s Amazing Stories TV series. Well, even greater news is for fans of the original magazine and other pulp fiction publications of the early half of the 20th century: Amazing Stories trademark owner Steve Davidson was moved by those plans so much that he intends to relaunch the magazine both in print and digital! Check out more details about this potential relaunch in my article at Examiner.com. 


"Amazing Stories" magazine cover depicting a huge, spherical space craft hovering over an alien landscape.
Photo Credit: Experimenter Publishing/Wikimedia Commons



Science fiction as the genre we know it today started with the Amazing Stories magazine back in the 1920s and some of the greatest writers established their literary careers writing for it, including Hugo Gernsback who founded and served as editor of the publication. The magazine helped bring in the pulp era of fiction which included a huge flourishing of sci fi literature (including comics), movies, radio and eventually TV shows. It is this era of science fiction, often known as the golden era of the genre, why many of us here in the U.S. read and write speculative fiction today.


Next week I’d like to discuss some writing tips inspired by my attendance at Sinister Creature Con earlier last month.

Until then . . . 

Comments

  1. Thanks again, Steven!
    Would be cool to see an updated Amazing Stories series.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No problem, Alex. It would be really interesting to see how an updated Amazing Stories would do and what kinds of stories by which writers would be written. There isn't a better time for it than now, since the Golden Age of sci fi in the '40s and '50s, because in a way we are going through a new golden age of the genre because it has come back into thriving popularity (especially for television). Hopefully that popularity will continue to grow.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book-To-Movie: ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’

Credit: Wikimedia Commons I apologise for posting outside our regular post-day which is late Saturday night/early Sunday morning. However, I got behind on several things last week and so had to postpone the post to today.  I’ve been a reader of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books ever since I was 11. What I’ve always liked so much about the series is that, like a good horror story, the stories often take place in dark settings and involve bizarre cases. Conan Doyle’s novel, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, definitely contains these elements. It’s a detective story that crosses over into the gothic horror genre. Several movie adaptations of the novel have been made that go as far back as a 1915 German silent film. In 1959 Hammer Studios released a version starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. As much as I’m a fan of the Hammer horror films, I have not seen that one yet. The only one that I’ve seen so far is the 1939 adaptation starring that other big name in classic Bri

Book-To-Movie: ‘I Am Legend’

A vampire similar to the ones in 2008's "I Am Legend" which starred Will Smith. Credit: Pixabay.com It’s time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie, I review a book and its movie adaptations. This month’s book and its movies based on it is I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. While vampires were no longer in in the American pop culture of the the 1950s, science fiction horror in general was. So Matheson’s I Am Legend brought the scientificising of vampires into the pulp literary scene of that era. Not too long after, in the early ‘60s, the first of three book-to-movie adaptions appeared and was renamed The Last Man On Earth which starred Vincent Price. The other two were The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston in the ‘70s and I Am Legend starring Will Smith in the 2001s. Even though each one debunked the myth of the vampire as a supernatural being, each had its own depiction of the creature. ‘I Am Legend’, The Book Set in a near post-apocalyptic fu

Book-To-Movie: Stephen King’s 'The Raft'

Credit: Pixabay.com It's the third Saturday of the month and so that means it's time for another Book-To-Movie ! In a Book-To-Movie we review a book and its movie adaptation. One of the reasons I as a horror fan don’t read a lot of Stephen King’s work is because most of it consists of novels that go more than 400 pages. I have a short attention span when it comes to reading, ironically since I consider myself an avid reader, and so I normally won’t read a work that is much more than the equivalent to a 350-page mass market paperback. The other reason why I don’t read a lot of King’s work is that, as literary scholars will tell you, a lot of his writing is poor. However, he does have some good writing in his works, especially his earlier stuff, including his short horror tales. So if I read anything by Stephen King it’s usually his short stories or novellas. One of his collections I’ve read is Skeleton Crew which includes some of his good, or at least better, fi