H. P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American writer who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. He was unknown during his lifetime and published only in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, but he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors of horror and weird fiction. Lovecraft was born in Rhode Island, where he spent most of his life. Among his most celebrated tales are The Rats in the Walls, The Call of Cthulhu, At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow over Innsmouth, The Shadow Out of Time, all canonical to the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft was never able to support himself from earnings as an author and editor, he saw commercial success elude him in his latter period, he subsisted in progressively strained circumstances in his last years. Lovecraft was born in his family home on August 1890, in Providence, Rhode Island, he was the only child of Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft. Though his employment is hard to discern, Lovecraft's future wife, Sonia Greene, stated that Winfield was employed by Gorham Manufacturing Company as a traveling salesman.
Susie's family was of substantial means at the time of their marriage, her father, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, being involved in many significant business ventures. In April 1893, after a psychotic episode in a Chicago hotel, Winfield was committed to Butler Hospital in Providence. Though it is not clear who reported Winfield's prior behavior to the hospital, medical records indicate that he had been "doing and saying strange things at times" for a year before his commitment. Winfield spent five years in Butler before dying in 1898, his death certificate listed the cause of death as general paresis, a term synonymous with late-stage syphilis. Susie never exhibited symptoms of the disease, leading to questions regarding the intimacy of their relationship. In 1969, Sonia Greene ventured that Susie was a "touch-me-not" wife and that Winfield, being a traveling salesmen, "took his sexual pleasures wherever he could find them." How Greene came to this opinion is unknown, as she never met Lovecraft's parents, though Lovecraft himself termed his mother a "touch-me-not" in a 1937 letter noting that, after his early childhood, she avoided all physical contact with him.
This is contrary to Susie's treatment of a young Lovecraft soon after his father's breakdown. According to the accounts of family friends, Susie doted over the young Lovecraft to a fault, pampering him and never letting him out of her sight. Throughout his life, Lovecraft maintained that his father fell into a paralytic state, due to insomnia and being overworked, remained that way until his death, it is unknown if Lovecraft was kept ignorant of his father's illness or if his remarks were intentionally misleading. After his father's hospitalization, Lovecraft resided in the family home with his mother, his maternal aunts Lillian and Annie, his maternal grandparents Whipple and Robie. Lovecraft recollected that after his father's illness his mother was "permanently stricken with grief." Whipple became a father figure to Lovecraft in this time, Lovecraft noting that his grandfather became the "centre of my entire universe." Whipple, who traveled on business, maintained correspondence by letter with the young Lovecraft who, by the age of three, was proficient at reading and writing.
When home Whipple would share weird tales of his own invention and show Lovecraft objects of art he had acquired in his European travels. Lovecraft credits Whipple with being instrumental in overcoming his fear of the dark when Whipple forced Lovecraft, at five years old, to walk through several darkened rooms in the family home, it was in this period that Lovecraft was introduced to some of his earliest literary influences such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner illustrated by Doré, One Thousand and One Nights, a gift from his mother, Thomas Bulfinch's Age of Fable and Ovid's Metamorphoses. While there is no indication that Lovecraft was close to his grandmother Robie, her death in 1896 had a profound effect. By his own account, it sent his family into "a gloom from which it never recovered." His mother and aunts' wearing of black mourning dresses "terrified" him, it is at this time that Lovecraft five and half years old, started having nightmares that would inform his writing. He began to have recurring nightmares of beings he termed "night-gaunts".
Thirty years night gaunts would appear in Lovecraft's writing. Lovecraft's earliest known literary works began at age seven with poems restyling the Odyssey and other mythological stories. Lovecraft has said that as a child he was enamored with the Roman pantheon of gods, accepting them as genuine expressions of divinity and foregoing his Christian upbringing, he recalls, at five years old, being told Santa Claus did not exist and retorting by asking why "God is not a myth." At the age of eight he took a keen interest in the sciences astronomy and chemistry. He examined the anatomy books available to him in the family library, learning the specifics of human reproduction that had yet to be explained to him, found that it "virtually killed my interest in the subject." In 1902, according to Lovecraft's own correspondence, astronomy became a guiding influence on his world view. He began producing the periodical Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy, of which 69
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of speculative fiction dealing with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, extraterrestrials in fiction. Science fiction explores the potential consequences of scientific other various innovations, has been called a "literature of ideas." "Science fiction" is difficult to define as it includes a wide range of concepts and themes. James Blish wrote: "Wells used the term to cover what we would today call'hard' science fiction, in which a conscientious attempt to be faithful to known facts was the substrate on which the story was to be built, if the story was to contain a miracle, it ought at least not to contain a whole arsenal of them."Isaac Asimov said: "Science fiction can be defined as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology." According to Robert A. Heinlein, "A handy short definition of all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world and present, on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method."Lester del Rey wrote, "Even the devoted aficionado or fan—has a hard time trying to explain what science fiction is," and that the reason for there not being a "full satisfactory definition" is that "there are no delineated limits to science fiction."
Author and editor Damon Knight summed up the difficulty, saying "science fiction is what we point to when we say it." Mark C. Glassy described the definition of science fiction as U. S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart did with the definition of pornography: "I know it when I see it." Science fiction had its beginnings in a time when the line between myth and fact was arguably more blurred than the present day. Written in the 2nd century CE by the satirist Lucian, A True Story contains many themes and tropes that are characteristic of contemporary science fiction, including travel to other worlds, extraterrestrial lifeforms, interplanetary warfare, artificial life; some consider it the first science-fiction novel. Some of the stories from The Arabian Nights, along with the 10th-century The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter and Ibn al-Nafis's 13th-century Theologus Autodidactus contain elements of science fiction. Products of the Age of Reason and the development of modern science itself, Johannes Kepler's Somnium, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, Cyrano de Bergerac's Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and The States and Empires of the Sun, Margaret Cavendish's "The Blazing World", Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Ludvig Holberg's Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum and Voltaire's Micromégas are regarded as some of the first true science-fantasy works.
Indeed, Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan considered Somnium the first science-fiction story. Following the 18th-century development of the novel as a literary form, Mary Shelley's books Frankenstein and The Last Man helped define the form of the science-fiction novel. Brian Aldiss has argued. Edgar Allan Poe wrote several stories considered science fiction, including "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" which featured a trip to the Moon. Jules Verne was noted for his attention to detail and scientific accuracy Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea which predicted the contemporary nuclear submarine. In 1887, the novel El anacronópete by Spanish author Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau introduced the first time machine. Many critics consider H. G. Wells one of science fiction's most important authors, or "the Shakespeare of science fiction." His notable science-fiction works include The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds. His science fiction imagined alien invasion, biological engineering and time travel.
In his non-fiction futurologist works he predicted the advent of airplanes, military tanks, nuclear weapons, satellite television, space travel, something resembling the World Wide Web. In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs published A Princess of Mars, the first of his three-decade-long planetary romance series of Barsoom novels, set on Mars and featuring John Carter as the hero. In 1926, Hugo Gernsback published the first American science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in which he wrote: By'scientifiction' I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision... Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading—they are always instructive, they supply knowledge... in a palatable form... New adventures pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow... Many great science stories destined to be of historical interest are still to be written...
Posterity will point to them as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and fiction, but progress as well. In 1928, E. E. "Doc" Smith's first published work, The Skylark of Space, written in collaboration with Lee Hawkins Garby, appeared in Amazing Stories. It is called the first great space opera; the same year, Philip Francis Nowlan's original Buck Rogers story, Armageddon 2419 appeared in Amazing Stories. This was followed by the first serious science-fiction comic. In 1937, John W. Campbell became editor of Astounding Science Fiction, an event, sometimes conside
Pseudonym
A pseudonym or alias is a name that a person or group assumes for a particular purpose, which can differ from their first or true name. Pseudonyms include stage names and user names, ring names, pen names, aliases, superhero or villain identities and code names, gamer identifications, regnal names of emperors and other monarchs, they have taken the form of anagrams and Latinisations, although there are many other methods of choosing a pseudonym. Pseudonyms should not be confused with new names that replace old ones and become the individual's full-time name. Pseudonyms are "part-time" names, used only in certain contexts – to provide a more clear-cut separation between one's private and professional lives, to showcase or enhance a particular persona, or to hide an individual's real identity, as with writers' pen names, graffiti artists' tags, resistance fighters' or terrorists' noms de guerre, computer hackers' handles. Actors, voice-over artists and other performers sometimes use stage names, for example, to better channel a relevant energy, gain a greater sense of security and comfort via privacy, more avoid troublesome fans/"stalkers", or to mask their ethnic backgrounds.
In some cases, pseudonyms are adopted because they are part of a cultural or organisational tradition: for example devotional names used by members of some religious institutes, "cadre names" used by Communist party leaders such as Trotsky and Lenin. A pseudonym may be used for personal reasons: for example, an individual may prefer to be called or known by a name that differs from their given or legal name, but is not ready to take the numerous steps to get their name changed. A collective name or collective pseudonym is one shared by two or more persons, for example the co-authors of a work, such as Carolyn Keene, Ellery Queen, Nicolas Bourbaki. Or James S. A. Corey; the term is derived from the Greek ψευδώνυμον "false name", from ψεῦδος, "lie, falsehood" and ὄνομα, "name". A pseudonym is distinct from an allonym, the name of another person, assumed by the author of a work of art; this may occur when someone is ghostwriting a book or play, or in parody, or when using a "front" name, such as by screenwriters blacklisted in Hollywood in the 1950s and 1960s.
See pseudepigraph, for falsely attributed authorship. Sometimes people change their name in such a manner that the new name becomes permanent and is used by all who know the person; this is not an alias or pseudonym, but in fact a new name. In many countries, including common law countries, a name change can be ratified by a court and become a person's new legal name. For example, in the 1960s, black civil rights campaigner Malcolm Little changed his surname to "X", to represent his unknown African ancestral name, lost when his ancestors were brought to North America as slaves, he changed his name again to Malik El-Shabazz when he converted to Islam. Some Jews adopted Hebrew family names upon immigrating to Israel, dropping surnames, in their families for generations; the politician David Ben-Gurion, for example, was born David Grün in Poland. He adopted his Hebrew name in 1910, when he published his first article in a Zionist journal in Jerusalem. Many transgender people choose to adopt a new name around the time of their social transitioning, to resemble their desired gender better than their birth name.
Businesspersons of ethnic minorities in some parts of the world are sometimes advised by an employer to use a pseudonym, common or acceptable in that area when conducting business, to overcome racial or religious bias. Criminals may use aliases, fictitious business names, dummy corporations to hide their identity, or to impersonate other persons or entities in order to commit fraud. Aliases and fictitious business names used for dummy corporations may become so complex that, in the words of the Washington Post, "getting to the truth requires a walk down a bizarre labyrinth" and multiple government agencies may become involved to uncover the truth. A pen name, or "nom de plume", is a pseudonym adopted by an author; some female authors used male pen names, in particular in the 19th century, when writing was a male-dominated profession. The Brontë family used pen names for their early work, so as not to reveal their gender and so that local residents would not know that the books related to people of the neighbourhood.
The Brontës used their neighbours as inspiration for characters in many of their books. Anne Brontë published The Tenant of Wildfell Hall under the name Acton Bell. Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre under the name Currer Bell. Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights as Ellis Bell. A well-known example of the former is Mary Ann Evans. Another example is Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, a 19th-century French writer who used the pen name George Sand. In contrast, some twentieth and twenty first century male romance novelists have used female pen names. A few examples of male authors using female pseudonyms include Brindle Chase, Peter O'Donnell and Christopher Wood. A pen name may be used if a writer's real name is to be confused with the name of another writer or notable individual, or if their real name is deemed to be unsuitable. Authors who write both fiction and non-fiction, or in different genres, may use
Solar System
The Solar System is the gravitationally bound planetary system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it, either directly or indirectly. Of the objects that orbit the Sun directly, the largest are the eight planets, with the remainder being smaller objects, such as the five dwarf planets and small Solar System bodies. Of the objects that orbit the Sun indirectly—the moons—two are larger than the smallest planet, Mercury; the Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a giant interstellar molecular cloud. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun, with the majority of the remaining mass contained in Jupiter; the four smaller inner planets, Venus and Mars, are terrestrial planets, being composed of rock and metal. The four outer planets are giant planets, being more massive than the terrestrials; the two largest and Saturn, are gas giants, being composed of hydrogen and helium. All eight planets have circular orbits that lie within a nearly flat disc called the ecliptic.
The Solar System contains smaller objects. The asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter contains objects composed, like the terrestrial planets, of rock and metal. Beyond Neptune's orbit lie the Kuiper belt and scattered disc, which are populations of trans-Neptunian objects composed of ices, beyond them a newly discovered population of sednoids. Within these populations are several dozen to tens of thousands of objects large enough that they have been rounded by their own gravity; such objects are categorized as dwarf planets. Identified dwarf planets include the trans-Neptunian objects Pluto and Eris. In addition to these two regions, various other small-body populations, including comets and interplanetary dust clouds travel between regions. Six of the planets, at least four of the dwarf planets, many of the smaller bodies are orbited by natural satellites termed "moons" after the Moon; each of the outer planets is encircled by planetary rings of dust and other small objects.
The solar wind, a stream of charged particles flowing outwards from the Sun, creates a bubble-like region in the interstellar medium known as the heliosphere. The heliopause is the point at which pressure from the solar wind is equal to the opposing pressure of the interstellar medium; the Oort cloud, thought to be the source for long-period comets, may exist at a distance a thousand times further than the heliosphere. The Solar System is located in the Orion Arm, 26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. For most of history, humanity did not understand the concept of the Solar System. Most people up to the Late Middle Ages–Renaissance believed Earth to be stationary at the centre of the universe and categorically different from the divine or ethereal objects that moved through the sky. Although the Greek philosopher Aristarchus of Samos had speculated on a heliocentric reordering of the cosmos, Nicolaus Copernicus was the first to develop a mathematically predictive heliocentric system.
In the 17th century, Galileo discovered that the Sun was marked with sunspots, that Jupiter had four satellites in orbit around it. Christiaan Huygens followed on from Galileo's discoveries by discovering Saturn's moon Titan and the shape of the rings of Saturn. Edmond Halley realised in 1705 that repeated sightings of a comet were recording the same object, returning once every 75–76 years; this was the first evidence that anything other than the planets orbited the Sun. Around this time, the term "Solar System" first appeared in English. In 1838, Friedrich Bessel measured a stellar parallax, an apparent shift in the position of a star created by Earth's motion around the Sun, providing the first direct, experimental proof of heliocentrism. Improvements in observational astronomy and the use of unmanned spacecraft have since enabled the detailed investigation of other bodies orbiting the Sun; the principal component of the Solar System is the Sun, a G2 main-sequence star that contains 99.86% of the system's known mass and dominates it gravitationally.
The Sun's four largest orbiting bodies, the giant planets, account for 99% of the remaining mass, with Jupiter and Saturn together comprising more than 90%. The remaining objects of the Solar System together comprise less than 0.002% of the Solar System's total mass. Most large objects in orbit around the Sun lie near the plane of Earth's orbit, known as the ecliptic; the planets are close to the ecliptic, whereas comets and Kuiper belt objects are at greater angles to it. All the planets, most other objects, orbit the Sun in the same direction that the Sun is rotating. There are exceptions, such as Halley's Comet; the overall structure of the charted regions of the Solar System consists of the Sun, four small inner planets surrounded by a belt of rocky asteroids, four giant planets surrounded by the Kuiper belt of icy objects. Astronomers sometimes informally divide this structure into separate regions; the inner Solar System includes the asteroid belt. The outer Solar System is including the four giant planets.
Since the discovery of the Kuiper belt, the outermost parts of the Solar Sys
Memorial Day
Memorial Day is a federal holiday in the United States for remembering and honoring persons who have died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. The holiday, observed every year on the last Monday of May, was most held on May 28, 2018. Memorial Day was observed on May 30 from 1868 to 1970. Memorial Day is considered the unofficial start of the summer vacation season in the United States, while Labor Day marks its end on the first Monday of September. In Canada, Victoria Day is a public holiday observed on a Monday one week before Memorial Day and indicates the start of summer. Many people visit cemeteries and memorials on Memorial Day to honor those who died in military service. Many volunteers place an American flag on each grave in national cemeteries. Two other days celebrate those who serve or have served in the U. S. military: Veterans Day, which celebrates the service of all U. S. military veterans. S. remembrance celebrated earlier in May honoring those serving in the U. S. military.
The history of Memorial Day in the United States is so controversial that it constitutes an area of research. At Columbus State University there is a Center for Memorial Day Research. It, together with the University of Mississippi's Center for Civil War Research, are excellent starting points for investigating the topic; the practice of decorating soldiers' graves with flowers is an ancient custom. Soldiers' graves were decorated in the U. S. before and during the American Civil War. Some believe that an annual cemetery decoration practice began before the American Civil War and thus may reflect the real origin of the "memorial day" idea. Annual Decoration Days for particular cemeteries are still held on a Sunday in late spring or early summer in some rural areas of the American South, notably in the mountain areas. In cases involving a family graveyard where remote ancestors, as well as those who died more are buried, this may take on the character of an extended family reunion to which some people travel hundreds of miles.
People gather, put flowers on graves, renew contacts with relatives and others. There is a religious service and a picnic-like "dinner on the grounds", the traditional term for a potluck meal at a church. On June 3, 1861, Virginia, was the location of the first Civil War soldier's grave to be decorated, according to a Richmond Times-Dispatch newspaper article in 1906. In 1862, women in Savannah, Georgia decorated Confederate soldiers' graves according to the Savannah Republican; the 1863 cemetery dedication at Gettysburg, was a ceremony of commemoration at the graves of dead soldiers. Some have therefore claimed. On July 4, 1864, ladies decorated soldiers' graves according to local historians in Boalsburg, yet the principal grave they claim to have decorated was of a man, not dead yet. Nonetheless, Boalsburg promotes itself as the birthplace of Memorial Day. In April 1865, following President Abraham Lincoln's assassination, commemorations were widespread; the more than 600,000 soldiers of both sides who died in the Civil War meant that burial and memorialization took on new cultural significance.
Under the leadership of women during the war, an formal practice of decorating graves had taken shape. In 1865, the federal government began creating national military cemeteries for the Union war dead. On May 1, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina freed African-Americans held a parade of 10,000 people to honor 257 dead Union Soldiers, whose remains they had reburied from a mass grave in a Confederate prison camp. Historian David W. Blight cites contemporary news reports of this incident in the Charleston Daily Courier and the New-York Tribune. Although Blight claimed that "African Americans invented Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina", in 2012, Blight stated that he "has no evidence" that the event in Charleston inspired the establishment of Memorial Day across the country. Accordingly, investigators for Time Magazine, LiveScience, RealClearLife and Snopes have called this conclusion into question. In 1868, copying the Southern annual observance of the previous three years, General John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans founded in Decatur, established Decoration Day as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the Union war dead with flowers.
By the 20th century, various Union and Confederate memorial traditions, celebrated on different days and Memorial Day extended to honor all Americans who died while in the military service. On May 26, 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson designated an "official" birthplace of the holiday by signing the presidential proclamation naming Waterloo, New York, as the holder of the title; this action followed House Concurrent Resolution 587, in which the 89th Congress had recognized that the patriotic tradition of observing Memorial Day had begun one hundred years prior in Waterloo, New York. The village credits druggist Henry C. Welles and county clerk John B. Murray as the founders of the holiday. Scholars have determined. Snopes and Live Science discredit the Waterloo account. On May 5, 1868, General John A. Logan issued a proclamation calling for "Decoration Day" to be observed annually and nationwide. With his proclamation, Logan adopted the Memorial Day practice that had begun in the Southern states three years earlier.
The first Northern Memorial Day was observed on May 30, 1868. One author claims that the date wa
Sword and sorcery
Sword and sorcery is a subgenre of fantasy characterized by sword-wielding heroes engaged in exciting and violent adventures. An element of romance is present, as is an element of magic and the supernatural. Unlike works of high fantasy, the tales, though dramatic, focus on personal battles rather than world-endangering matters. Sword and sorcery overlaps with heroic fantasy; the term "sword and sorcery" was coined in 1961 by the celebrated American author Fritz Leiber in response to a letter from British author Michael Moorcock in the fanzine Amra, demanding a name for the sort of fantasy-adventure story written by Robert E. Howard. Moorcock had proposed the term "epic fantasy". Leiber replied in the journal Ancalagon, suggesting "sword-and-sorcery as a good popular catchphrase for the field", he expanded on this in the July 1961 issue of Amra, commenting: I feel more certain than that this field should be called the sword-and-sorcery story. This describes the points of culture-level and supernatural element and immediately distinguishes it from the cloak-and-sword story—and from the cloak-and-dagger story too!
Since its inception, many attempts have been made to provide a precise definition of "sword and sorcery". Although many have debated the finer points, the consensus characterizes it by a strong bias toward fast-paced, action-rich tales set within a quasi-mythical or fantastical framework. Unlike high fantasy, the stakes in sword and sorcery tend to be personal, the danger confined to the moment of telling. Settings are exotic, protagonists morally compromised. Many sword and sorcery tales have been turned into a lengthy series of adventures, their lower stakes and less-than world-threatening dangers make this more plausible than a repetition of the perils of epic fantasy. So too does the nature of the heroes. At one extreme, the heroes of E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros grieve for the end of the war and that they have no more foes equal to those they defeated. Sword and sorcery draws from mythology and classical epics such as Homer's Odyssey, the Norse sagas and Arthurian legend, it is influenced by historical fiction, for instance that of Sir Walter Scott, influenced by Scottish folklore and ballads.
However few of Scott's stories contain fantastic elements. However, its themes of adventure in a strange society influenced the adventures set in foreign lands by H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Haggard's works included many fantastic elements. Sword and sorcery's immediate progenitors are the swashbuckling tales of Alexandre Dumas, père, Rafael Sabatini and their pulp magazine imitators, such as Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb, H. Bedford-Jones, who all influenced Robert E. Howard. However, these historical "swashbucklers" lack the supernatural element that defines the genre. Another influence was early fantasy fiction such as Lord Dunsany's The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth and A. Merritt's The Ship of Ishtar. All of these authors influenced sword and sorcery for the plots and landscapes used. In addition, many early sword and sorcery writers, such as Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, were influenced by the Middle Eastern tales of the Arabian Nights, whose stories of magical monsters and evil sorcerers were a major influence on the genre-to-be.
Sword and sorcery's frequent depictions of smoky taverns and smelly back alleys draw upon the picaresque genre. Sword and sorcery proper only began in the pulp fantasy magazines, where it emerged from "weird fiction." Important was the magazine Weird Tales, which published Howard's Conan stories and C. L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry tales, as well as key S&S influences like Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith; the genre has been defined by the work of Robert E. Howard his tales of Conan the Barbarian and Kull of Atlantis in Weird Tales from 1932 and 1929 respectively. Other books and series that define the genre of sword-and-sorcery include: Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborean and Zothique tales, beginning with "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" and "The Empire of the Necromancers" in 1931 and 1932, respectively. C. L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry tales, beginning with "Black God's Kiss", which introduced the first notable sword and sorcery heroine. Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser sequence, beginning with "Two Sought Adventure".
Michael Moorcock's Elric sequence, beginning with The Dreaming City, notable for its adherence to counterstereotype. L. Sprague de Camp's Swords and Sorcery was the first sorcery anthology, it was published by Pyramid Books in December 1963. Karl Edward Wagner's Kane novels, beginning with Darkness Weaves, credited with reinvigorating the genre. Robert Lynn Asprin's Thieves' World, a series of shared world anthologies first created in 1978. Samuel R. Delany's Return of Nevèrÿon, a series of three story collections and one novel influenced by critical theory, published from 1979 to 1987. Charles Saunders' Imaro novels, beginning with Imaro, a collection of short stories first published in the seve
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
Analog Science Fiction and Fact is an American science fiction magazine published under various titles since 1930. Titled Astounding Stories of Super-Science, the first issue was dated January 1930, published by William Clayton, edited by Harry Bates. Clayton went bankrupt in 1933 and the magazine was sold to Street & Smith; the new editor was F. Orlin Tremaine, who soon made Astounding the leading magazine in the nascent pulp science fiction field, publishing well-regarded stories such as Jack Williamson's Legion of Space and John W. Campbell's "Twilight". At the end of 1937, Campbell took over editorial duties under Tremaine's supervision, the following year Tremaine was let go, giving Campbell more independence. Over the next few years Campbell published many stories that became classics in the field, including Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, A. E. van Vogt's Slan, several novels and stories by Robert A. Heinlein; the period beginning with Campbell's editorship is referred to as the Golden Age of Science Fiction.
By 1950, new competition had appeared from Galaxy Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Campbell's interest in some pseudo-science topics, such as dianetics, alienated some of his regular writers, Astounding was no longer regarded as the leader of the field, though it did continue to publish popular and influential stories: Hal Clement's novel Mission of Gravity appeared in 1953, Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations" appeared the following year. In 1960, Campbell changed the title of the magazine to Analog Science Fact. At about the same time Street & Smith sold the magazine to Condé Nast. Campbell remained as editor until his death in 1971. Ben Bova took over from 1972 to 1978, the character of the magazine changed noticeably, since Bova was willing to publish fiction that included sexual content and profanity. Bova published stories such as Frederik Pohl's "The Gold at the Starbow's End", nominated for both a Hugo and Nebula Award, Joe Haldeman's "Hero", the first story in the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning "Forever War" sequence.
Bova won five consecutive Hugo Awards for his editing of Analog. Bova was followed by Stanley Schmidt, who continued to publish many of the same authors, contributing for years; the title was sold to Davis Publications in 1980 to Dell Magazines in 1992. Crosstown Publications remains the publisher. Schmidt continued to edit the magazine until 2012. In 1926, Hugo Gernsback launched the first science fiction magazine. Gernsback had been printing scientific fiction stories for some time in his hobbyist magazines, such as Modern Electrics and Electrical Experimenter, but decided that interest in the genre was sufficient to justify a monthly magazine. Amazing was successful reaching a circulation over 100,000. William Clayton, a successful and well-respected publisher of several pulp magazines, considered starting a competitive title in 1928. Clayton was unconvinced, but the following year decided to launch a new magazine because the sheet on which the color covers of his magazines were printed had a space for one more cover.
He suggested to Harry Bates, a newly hired editor, that they start a magazine of historical adventure stories. Bates proposed instead a science fiction pulp, to be titled Astounding Stories of Super Science, Clayton agreed. Astounding was published by Publisher's Fiscal Corporation, a subsidiary of Clayton Magazines; the first issue appeared with Bates as editor. Bates aimed for straightforward action-adventure stories, with scientific elements only present to provide minimal plausibility. Clayton paid much better rates than Amazing and Wonder Stories—two cents a word on acceptance, rather than half a cent a word, on publication —and Astounding attracted some of the better-known pulp writers, such as Murray Leinster, Victor Rousseau, Jack Williamson. In February 1931, the original name Astounding Stories of Super-Science was shortened to Astounding Stories; the magazine was profitable. A publisher would pay a printer three months in arrears, but when a credit squeeze began in May 1931, it led to pressure to reduce this delay.
The financial difficulties led Clayton to start alternating the publication of his magazines, he switched Astounding to a bimonthly schedule with the June 1932 issue. Some printers bought the magazines which were indebted to them: Clayton decided to buy his printer to prevent this from happening; this proved a disastrous move. Clayton did not have the money to complete the transaction, in October 1932, Clayton decided to cease publication of Astounding, with the expectation that the January 1933 issue would be the last one; as it turned out, enough stories were in inventory, enough paper was available, to publish one further issue, so the last Clayton Astounding was dated March 1933. In April, Clayton went bankrupt, sold his magazine titles to T. R. Foley for $100. Science fiction was not a departure for Street & Smith. They
