About Z7
I've been a mystery, SF and fantasy fan every since I can remember. I'm a published author, a business owner, and a self-appointed expert on strange books, pulp literature, and spy movies.
Available for lectures. Donations appreciated.
As practiced, the warbrides pushed the pirates out of the way, back into the mob that flooded from the pirate side of the corridor and continued until they reached the back of it. The two women in front turned and began chopping at everything in their path. They turned and worked their way back the front of the gaggle of pirates.
Shakti estimated forty pirates on the other side, which was plenty for them to harvest. The corridor sprayed red as the warbrides sent blood everywhere. The pirate’s armor was no match for the weapons wielded by the warbrides and soon their disorganized mob was in full retreat back down the corridor.
In some ways, A Thousand Cuts is a sequel to another book about film collectors, Land of a Thousand Balconies by Jack Stevenson, published in 2003. The other book came out when DVD’s were supplanting film collecting and there were still plenty of video stores you could rent movies from every day. Now, the video stores have gone the way of the Drive-In. I count myself fortunate to have seen two forms of entertainment medium rise and fall. Everything can be found on the Internet these days and you can always order the special edition Blu-ray if you’re really dedicated. Gone are the days when I had to see Animal House a third time to hear what Dean Wormer and Carmine were discussing because the laughter of the audience drowned out their conversation.
The Golden Amazon by John Russel Fearn was introduced to the world in its second form in 1944. Although Wildside Press is publishing many of the books in this series, they started with book seven because it was decided this was the most appropriate book for a beginning. However, the real beginning of this series was with this first book. This is the secret origin of Violet Ray Brand, the Golden Amazon of fame. As has been said before. The first round of the Golden Amazon was in a series of planetary romances where she was a human woman of immense power raised in the jungles of Venus. Fearn decided to revamp it in 1944 as a whole pulp heroine. Therefore, that makes this book -6 if you mark them by the Wildside Press method.
Snowden, directed by Hollywood stalwart director Oliver Stone, opened this week at a local theater called Movie Tavern. Movie Tavern is a big chain of restaurant themed movie theaters, which serves food while you watch the video projection film on the screen. The movie I saw was shown in a large theater with plenty of legroom. I caught the afternoon show while my car was being serviced at the dealer. From what I could tell, there were all of two other people in the audience besides me.
Longarm is one of the first adult westerns that came on the scene in the late 1970’s. By the 60’s, the western novel was in a serious popularity decline due to the fading of the western TV show and other factors. I won’t go into what those other factors were, whole books were written on the subject. Even today, it is hard to find a book section with “western” listed, at least in those bookstores that still remain. About ten years after the Euro-western movie proved there was still a market for horse operas, someone decided the genre needed a shot of Spanish fly and the adult western was born.
The Last Buffoon by Len Levinson chronicles the life of a paperback writer in the late 1970’s. The writer is Levinson’s alter ego, Alexander Frapkin, a middle-aged Jewish man who is in the process of losing his sanity as he fights book publishers who won’t pay him, landlords who won’t fix his apartment, drug dealers whom he owes money, and a lawyer who has a very definite interest in the author’s love life.
Sibyl Sue Blue by Rosel George Brown is one of those books which defined the sixties. The latter half of the decade was famous for all manner of innovative science fiction and gave rise to the “new wave” of the genre. Rockets became fertility symbols and cigars spaceships. There were plenty of the old guard still banging away at the typewriters, but even Philip K Dick was working on overload to find out how Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
The Sympathizer, by Viet Nguyen, is a new breed of noir novel, which academia is turning out these days. The author is a distinguished man of letters at in California, so I would expect nothing less from him. And he doesn’t disappoint. This is the story of the Vietnam conflict told through the eyes of an undercover spy, a mole, a deep operative, a man without a name who is a metaphor for so much. Except that he can’t seem to remember who he is.
In The Fabulous Clipjoint, we see why Frederic Brown was one of the greatest short story writers and novelists of the 20th century.
Kim Oh #7; Real Dangerous Plan continues the Kim Oh series in excellent form. In this episode, Kim Oh, the tiny twentysomething Korean American gun woman, is stuck in the hellhole of the American Southwest. One thing I have to admit about Jeter, no one does a better job of portraying the depressive state of being lost in America.
