Category: Science Fiction

Future Fashion

A comic book panel from the early 1970s that combines quickly fading hippie fashion with Space Age aesthetics. Even for its time, that text is pretty cringeworthy!

Naughty SFF Paperbook Covers from the 1960s (Part 2)

Back to more SF sleaze. Here’s another book that makes no sense. The title may be referring to The Night Life of the Gods, the 1931 fantasy humor novel by Thorne Smith, which was mild whimsy about what happens when Greek Gods enter contemporary New York and have a night out on the town. But …

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Naughty SFF Paperbook Covers from the 1960s (Part 1)

* smirk * The 1960s was a time period in which Playboy magazine type humor, the counterculture, and the SFF genre intertwined. Looking to cash in on these various trends, publishers released an astonishing variety of “adult” naughty novels embodying this robust, exploitive stew. The humor ranged from martini-dry to crass (as in the above …

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The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon [Review]

The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon by Moira Greyland Castalia House, 2018 The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon is the book that grew out of the 2014 revelation that fantasy and science fiction and fantasy author Marion Zimmer Bradley abused her own children and knowingly protected and facilitated her husband Walter …

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Too much to drink

Aliens who indulge in too many x’Qyschn shots should be very grateful to have helping hands lead them  home from the bar. (The English translation of this — it’s Dutch — means “Horror on Alpha Centauri” while  “Vlaamse Filmkens” might indicate it was a movie.)

Golden Trillium [Review]

Golden Trillium by Andre Norton Bantam Books, 1993 Golden Trillium is the third book in the Trillium series of fantasy novels, which debuted, with much fanfare, in 1990 with Black Trillium. Since that’s over 30 years ago, I’ll recap the project here. Three respected female writers of classic SFF, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton, and …

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AI Art Adventures: Fiddler on the Ref

After a year or so mucking around on Midjourney I’ve only recently begun using the –sref and –cref functions. What are these, do you ask? Well, they are offshoots of the basic reference pic users can paste into their /imagine prompts. Midjourney calls them Imagine URLS. As the user’s manual says, “Imagine URLS can be …

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The Sentinals

Silent they stood, surveying the quiet countryside. It was a matter of time before they would be discovered, yet it mattered not to them; the world would have changed so drastically by that point that none of the sentients would have been much interested.

An Eight-Legged Aslan?

No… it’s just a whimsical illustration for a French edition of Thuvia, Maid of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, depicting a Martian banth (apex carnivore resembling a multilegged lion. )

The Product
[Reading Challenge 2024]

The Product by Marina Fontaine Conservatarian Press, 2022 [ #23  After the fall: A post-apocalyptic or dystopic book. ] This book kept popping up in my Kindle feed, so I chose it for the “Dystopia” category of this year’s challenge. It occurred to me when writing this review that “Russian Dystopia” is perhaps a subset, …

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