David Lee Summers's Blog, page 42

TusCon 48

This coming weekend, I will be one of the programming participants at TusCon 48, which will be held at the Sheraton Tucson Hotel and Suites in Tucson, Arizona from November 12-14, 2021. The author guest of honor will be New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Ashley. The artist guest of honor will be Jill Bauman, who has illustrated hundreds of works including those by writers such as Harlan Ellison, Stephen King, Peter Straub, and Lilian Jackson Braun. The fan guest of honor will be Doreen W...

Publishing Update, Autumn 2021

This autumn finds me in full-out editing and layout mode. I’m working on some of my own titles along with some books by other authors, all to be released through Hadrosaur Productions. I thought I’d take this opportunity to glimpse at the books that will be appearing in the coming months. Note, links in this post will take you to pages where you can learn more about the books I mention.

Greg Ballan should be no stranger to fans of Hadrosaur Productions. We recently published the second ed...

Penny Dreadful – Season Three

Halloween kicked off this week. Like many people, I enjoy some spooky films or books to get into the spirit of the season. Last week, my wife and I decided to watch the final season of Showtime’s series, Penny Dreadful. Just as a head’s up, I will endeavor to be as spoiler free as I can about the final season itself, but I will likely include some spoilers from the first two seasons. Proceed with appropriate caution!

Penny Dreadful Season Three

Penny Dreadful’s third season picks up where ...

DeadSteam II

I am excited this Halloween Eve to announce the publication of DeadSteam II edited by Bryce Raffle. My short story “The Sun Worshiper’s Ghost” is one of the thirteen stories included in this volume.

Just when you thought the nightmare was over, what was dead comes crawling back from the beyond. We warned you not to open that fateful tome. But you just couldn’t resist, could you?

Back with more chilling tales of the dark and supernatural, the anthology of dreadpunk, gaslamp, and dark st...

Perry Rhodan Neo

The line might be a marketing cliché but in this case, it might literally be true that Perry Rhodan is the most famous space hero you’ve never heard of. Perry Rhodan is the protagonist in a long-running series of space adventure stories published in Germany. The series started in 1961 and continues to this day. There are over 3100 Perry Rhodan novellas. I can’t think of anything quite like that in the United States. The closest equivalents I can think of are some long-running comic book series o...

The Conquest of the Moon

When most people today think of nineteenth century French science fiction, I suspect the first name that comes to mind is Jules Verne. However, he wasn’t the only writer who speculated about extraordinary journeys around the world or to other worlds. While doing research for the panel “From Jules Verne to Jacques Tardi” which I presented with James Keeline at Gaslight Steampunk Expo earlier this month, I came across the works of André Laurie. Like Jules Verne, Laurie was published by Pierre-Jule...

The Chimera Brigade

Earlier this month, I was a guest at the Gaslight Steampunk Expo in San Diego, California. The theme was the 1889 Universelle Exposition du Paris where Gustave Eiffel built the largest structure on the planet to date. I knew the country that produced Jules Verne had a strong interest in steampunk. I was aware of Jacques Tardi’s Adèle Blanc-Sec comic series and the wonderful movie April and the Extraordinary World, also inspired by Tardi’s work. I also knew the steampunk-flavored animated musical...

William Shatner in Space

Earlier this week, William Shatner took a ride into space aboard a rocket built by Blue Origin, a company founded by Jeff Bezos, best known as the founder of Amazon. The rocket launched from outside Van Horn, Texas, a town about two and a half hours to the southeast of my home in New Mexico. As a long-time Star Trek fan, I thought it was great that Shatner, who brought the role of Captain Kirk to life, had the opportunity to go into space for real. What’s more, at 90 years old, Shatner is the ol...

The Martian Chronicles

Last month, I received an ad from Big Finish productions saying that their production of The Martian Chronicles would be going out of print soon. This audio production starred Derek Jacobi and Hayley Atwell whose performances I love. What’s more, Big Finish offered the production at a very nice clearance price, so I picked it up. It turns out the production was a dramatization of three stories that comprise what might be called the “Captain Wilder arc” in Bradbury’s famous collection along w...

The Valley of Gwangi

Last month, Robert E. Vardeman mentioned that he’s a fan of the Ray Harryhausen film The Valley of Gwangi in a post on his Patreon site. A couple of weeks later, when I was on a panel discussing Weird Westerns with Jeff Mariotte at the virtual CoKoCon, the film came up again. Although I had been aware of the film and had seen clips, I’d never watched the whole thing before, so I took this as a sign that I should finally sit down and watch it.

Cowboys and dinosaurs meet in The Valley of Gwangi...