Rogue Blades Entertainment, publisher of the excellent fantasy anthologies Rage of the Behemoth and Return of the Sword, has announced by way of editor Jason M. Waltz the first annual RBE Challenge! fundraising Writing Contest. The fifteen top stories will be printed in Discovery, the competition anthology.

The cover art featured above is by V. Shane.

A few words by Jason Waltz:

[Discovery] is a competition anthology open to anyone who writes heroic action adventure of ANY genre! Using V Shane’s above artwork and the title Discovery as inspiration, pen me mighty and mysterious tales of action and adventure. Speculative fiction is NOT required for Challenge! themes! Sword & Sorcery, Sword & Planet, Soul & Sandal, Western, Mystery, Dark Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, Sci-Fi, even Horror and Romance! You name it, so long as it’s heroic fiction, you can submit it.

More details (including prizes, judges, submission guidelines, etc…) can be read on the official announcement page. Submissions will open on June 1st, 2010 and run till September 1st, 2010. Jason is expecting yarns between 3,000 and 9,000 words. The entry fee is a cheap $10, so if you’re an aspiring writer, this might be your chance to see your words printed in an anthology by a (good) professional publisher of heroic adventure.

Mythos Con, a new convention celebrating the life and works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, is scheduled for January 6 to 9, 2011, in Phoenix, Arizona. It will feature art, merchants, movies, panels and games. A large number of writers, artists and film makers will attend, including contributors to the Cimmerian print journal like Donald Sidney-Fryer and Chuck Hoffman.

You can find more details on the official website by clicking here.

Thanks to Grim Blogger for the heads-up.

“Karamaneh” was the sixth installment of Sax Rohmer’s serial, Fu-Manchu first published in THE STORY-TELLER in March 1913. The story would later comprise Chapters 16 and 17 of the novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (re-titled The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu for U.S. publication). The story opens with Nayland Smith, Dr. Petrie, and Inspector Weymouth preparing a dragnet around the area where Dr. Fu-Manchu is known to have a base of operations. They have no illusion that they will capture the doctor himself, but hope to round up enough of his minions to deal a significant blow to the enemy.

Smith and Petrie are among a dozen Scotland Yard men combing the area. As they pass by a gypsy encampment, Smith recognizes one of the gypsies as a disguised dacoit who is wanted for murder in Burma (where Smith serves as police commissioner). While they fail to apprehend the man, they succeed in capturing the female gypsy before she can escape. The disguised gypsy woman turns out to be the mysterious slave girl who has repeatedly saved Petrie’s life since Smith first involved him in the affair. Rohmer does an excellent job in conveying Petrie’s mixed feelings of compulsion and revulsion when faced with this dangerous and exotic woman.

The reader shares Petrie’s ambivalence towards this complex character. She is beautiful and graced with a foreign otherness that defies precise identification and she has risked her own life several times in order to save Petrie, yet she has also willingly participated in the murder of countless other innocent men. Rohmer makes much of her unabashed stare that few men would be able to meet. Petrie is fascinated with her, but also feels ashamed that the object of his affection is opposed to all that defines a British subject at this point in time. (Continue reading this post)

It is one of the goriest and most bizarre episodes in the bizarre and gory history of Central Asia. In the chaos of the Russian Civil War, a White Russian warlord, descendant of German Baltic Crusaders, arose in Mongolia to build an empire on a foundation of human skulls.

His name was Baron Roman Federovich von Ungern-Sternberg — partisan warrior, mystic and madman.

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Over on his Drums of Nyumbani blog, Charles R. Saunders has posted an entry entitled, “In Memoriam: Frank Frazetta.” Mr. Saunders reminisces about his discovery of Frazetta’s work, depictions of blacks in Frank’s art and also speculates about what a Frazetta cover for an Imaro novel might have looked like. CRS does an admirable job covering the latter two topics, but I have few more factoids and opinions to add. Feel free to click the link above, read the post and click back here.

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Subterranean Press has just released the Science Fiction short stories collection The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition by Ray Bradbury.

With fiction stories, essays, introductions and two screenplays by Bradbury himself, it claims to be a definitive edition. Here is the table of contents and some additional information from SubPress:

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Robert J. Myers is a study in contradictions. A veteran CIA operative, he became the publisher of The New Republic. In the mid-1970s, Myers authored two sequels to Mary Shelley’s classic, Frankenstein. Having a longstanding interest in literary pastiches, I tracked down these two long out-of-print titles and recently read the first, The Cross of Frankenstein (1975). The prolific nature of the Universal and Hammer Frankenstein movies was understandable, but the original novel has always seemed more challenging to extend – even more so than Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Neither story demands literary sequels, nor did their authors choose to pursue them – a fact that makes the ambitions of prospective continuation authors all the more difficult to realize with any degree of success.

Mary Shelley’s original reads like a modern fable. The scientist who transgresses nature’s laws is destroyed by the abomination he brought into existence with his own hand. It is the same fable Michael Crichton fashioned nearly 200 years later into Jurassic Park. Shelley’s alternate title for the book, The Modern Prometheus is frequently forgotten, but it is critical to an understanding of how the novel differs from the 1931 Universal horror classic that imbued itself in the public consciousness. The monster of Shelley’s novel may be lacking a flat head and neck bolts, but he makes up for it in spades with his philosophical yearning for his own place in the universe and with the father/creator who abandoned him.

Once the artificial man resolves to destroy his creator, his unrelenting thirst for vengeance leads us to the dire ending where the monster watches his creator expire on his death-bed and resolves to commit suicide thereafter. No matter how many times I’ve read the story, I never doubt the monster’s resolution to end his miserable existence. His purpose has been exhausted. God creates man. Man creates Artificial Man in an attempt to become God. Artificial Man destroys his Creator and then ceases to have a reason to exist. This is more than a re-statement of Michael Crichton at his most didactic; it is also an accurate summation of the theological, moral, philosophical, and bioethical issues the nineteen year-old Mary Shelley wrestled with in her amazing novel.

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Wildside Press has released two interesting volumes that I failed to mention earlier this year, Tiger By the Tail! Two Dominic Flandry Adventures and Killer’s Dozen: Thirteen Mystery Tales, respectively authored by Poul Anderson and Richard A. Lupoff.

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Author Milton Davis has a new blog, Wagadu, dedicated to his Sword-and-Soul literary creations. It should come as no surprise to TC readers that the Godfather of Sword-and-Soul, Charles R. Saunders, stopped by Wagadu to write about Davis’ upcoming novel, Changa’s Safari.

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The latest Harold Lamb volumes from Bison books, Swords from the Sea and Swords from the East, already announced last December on The Cimmerian, are now available.

Richard L. Tierney’s poetry collection Savage Menace and other poems of horror is also out now. Some additional information not included in my January 26th blog post on this promising book can be read below.

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