Forgotten Authors: Richard Tooker

Forgotten Authors: Richard Tooker

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Richard Tooker

Richard Tooker was born in Farina, Illinois on July 3, 1902 to George Lattimer Tooker and Laura J. (nee Switzer) Tooker. His family eventually left the small town of 600 people to move to North Dakota and also lived in Minneapolis.

After graduating from prep school, he took a job as an editor of Westerns before serving for two years as a private in the U.S. Marine Corps during the 1920s. As with many authors he worked a variety of jobs, including as a musician, journalist, cowboy, railroad clerk, bank clerk, and a farmer. By the 1930s, he had settled in Phoenix, which would be his permanent home.

His first short story was “Planet Paradise,” published as by Dick Presley Tooker was written when he was only fifteen, but did not appear until the February 1924 issue of Weird Tales. His only other publication in the 1920s was the novel The Day of the Brown Horde, published by Payson & Clarke in 1929. It would be reviewed in both Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories and later an excerpt would be reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries.

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Who Watches the Watchmen? Space Cadet by Robert A. Heinlein

Who Watches the Watchmen? Space Cadet by Robert A. Heinlein

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Space Cadet (Ace Books, May 1971). Cover by Davis Meltzer

A book with the title Space Cadet is a little hard to take seriously; not many people can help thinking of the slang meaning. But it wasn’t used that way when Heinlein wrote it in 1948. If some people didn’t take it seriously, it was because science fiction as such wasn’t taken seriously — but Heinlein himself was quite serious about it.

In fact his novel was the first public use of the phrase, though it became better known after the television show Tom Corbett, Space Cadet bought the right to use it from him in 1950 — enough so that in 1953, Porky Pig appeared in Duck Dodgers in the 24th 1/2 Century as an “eager young space cadet.” The expression might have suggested youth and naiveté, but not being out of touch with reality.

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The Weird Must Flow: The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Volume 2, edited by Michael Kelly

The Weird Must Flow: The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Volume 2, edited by Michael Kelly

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The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Volume 2 (Undertow Publications, August 18, 2026). Cover by Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis

Weirdness is often part of horror, so we might call it a sub-genre that editor Michael Kelly has decided to further explore (after an excellent previous anthology) by collecting a number of dark short stories penned by a group of distinguished authors.

As a reviewer I enjoy the privilege of focusing on the stories that I’ve especially enjoyed, especially on the basis of their “weird” character.

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The Literacy Crisis: Literary Devices

The Literacy Crisis: Literary Devices

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Last one… for now

Good Afterevenmorn, Readers!

This is the last of the rants related to my misguided venture back into social media (must try and market, you know?) that resulted in several eyebrow-raising arguments in the bookish corner of those spaces.

This last one is perhaps most forgivable, and could be chalked up to not paying attention in English class, and perhaps not being especially well read. Clearly the original poster was not aware of certain literary devices (and maybe English in general).

It still raised my brows, however. Let’s dive in.

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Cimmerian September: Five Things I Think I Think – REH Edition

Cimmerian September: Five Things I Think I Think – REH Edition

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Welcome back to the final week of Cimmerian September. I realized that I’ve never done a Ten Things I Think I Think for REH. Now THAT seems remiss of me. So, we’ll ease into that with Five Things.

1) CONAN IS A ROGUE

Of course, “Rogues in the House” (which I wrote about for Hither Came Conan) is a favorite story among fans. It’s right there in the name. I’ve been re-reading some Solomon Kane lately, and I revisited El Borak last month. Those two are honorable men, fighting for justice, or nation, or to vanquish evil. Conan has his barbarian’s sense of honor. But he’s after wine, women, and money. He does ‘noble’ things, but that’s not what’s driving him. He’s a lusty sword swinger out for an adventurous life.

Sometimes I see the makings of a Conan story while I’m reading Kane and El Borak. But the character motivation is usually different. Doesn’t make it better or worse, but it does make the heroes different.

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Weird Times 6: Journalism and Politics

Weird Times 6: Journalism and Politics

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A newsboy in the 1920s.

This is the sixth post in a series reflecting on the world of the 1920s as a background to early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in a big city in 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine. What sort of things might you see? What do those things suggest about ways people think? What do they say about the stories they tell?

And what might you hear? Cars, of course, and maybe the buzz of conversation around you. But perhaps you’ll hear the voice of a boy on a streetcorner, holding up a newspaper and crying out a still-famous phrase: Extra! Extra! Read all about it! For this is a time when newsboys are still a feature of urban life.

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Thoughts on Designers & Dragons: Origins

Thoughts on Designers & Dragons: Origins

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Designers & Dragons: Origins, by Shannon Appelcline. Covers by Lorne Colt

This is emphatically not a review of Shannon Appelcline’s Designers & Dragons: Origins, although if you have an interest in 1970s and 1980s OD&D, D&D, or AD&D, you should grab a copy. Rather it is a collection of personal reflections having read the first two volumes and part of the third for reasons that will be made clear later.

I started playing D&D in 1980 with the Holmes box and the included module In Search of the Unknown. Someone else in the group wound up with a copy of The Keep on the Borderlands. My group quickly moved on to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, leaving the box set behind. When we began, one of us bought the Monster Manual, one bought the Player’s Handbook, and I bought the Dungeon Master’s Guide (I remember riding my bike home from Klipper’s hobby shop with the book in my backpack). Eventually we all filled out our collections. We made our way through our own worlds, but also through Greyhawk, once it was released and I had the folio version of Darlene’s map attached to a wooden board.

Reading these books made me understand why we were never going to see details of Greyhawk the way we eventually did of the Forgotten Realms, and why it would be impossible for Gary Gygax’s “real” Castle Greyhawk to be published.

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Forgotten Authors: Robert Arthur

Forgotten Authors: Robert Arthur

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Robert Arthur

Robert Arthur, Jr. was born on November 10, 1909 at Fort Mills on Corregidor in the Phillipines to Robert Jay Arthur and Sarah Abbie (nee Fee). His father was a Lieutenant stationed there at the time. As his father was stationed in various places, Arthur grew up on the movie, in Massachusetts, Michigan, Kansas, and Virginia. He attended Hampton High School in Virginia and was elected Senior Class President.

Although accepted to West Point, Arthur chose not to follow in his father’s footsteps, instead enrolling at the College of William and Mary. After his sophomore year, he transferred to the University of Michigan, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1930. Following graduation, he worked briefly as an editor for Munsey Publications before returning to work toward his Master of Arts in Journalism, which he received from Michigan in 1932.

After earning his Master’s, Arthur moved to Greenwich Village and began writing stories for the pulp magazines, appearing in Wonder Stories, The Shadow, Argosy Weekly, Unknown Worlds, Black Mask, and more. He also worked for Dell Magazines as an editor and as an associate editor for Photo-Story.

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Dark Muse News: An Introduction to Warhammer Quest – Darkwater

Dark Muse News: An Introduction to Warhammer Quest – Darkwater

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Games Workshop’s Warhammer Quest: Darkwater, Agents of the Order Azyr expansion, and White Dwarf Issues #520 and #527 (featuring expansion material)

Delving into the drowning Jade Abbey

This January, Dark Muse News began preparing for Warhammer Quest: Darkwater. Back then, I had just finished clicking the miniatures together (link to post). Finally, this post follows to cover an introductory foray into Warhammer Quests: Darkwater (2025) the latest cooperative dungeon crawler in Games Workshop’s lineup.

The original was released in 1995, and the series had a resurgence with Silver Tower in 2016, then Shadows Over Hammerhal (2017), Blackstone Fortress (2018), Cursed City (2021): and Lost Relics (2022). Unlike the skirmish and mega-battles that Warhammer is known for, these Quest games are cooperative (i.e., all players are on the same team fighting together against the game board). They have pre-generated character cards with stats and asymmetrical/unique actions. Expect lots of dice rolling and flipping of map tiles during exploration phases to reveal the sprawling dungeon.
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Stop the Madness: Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz

Stop the Madness: Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz

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A Canticle for Leibowitz (Bantam Books reprint edition, August 1976). Cover by Lou Feck

In Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, the humor is bleak, and the future worse. First published as a series of three stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1955-57, and then assembled into a fix-up novel in October of 1959, Canticle is a novel pinned like a helpless butterfly to the Cold War terror of nuclear annihilation – a notion that was then fresh and febrile, but has now faded into the background, as Miller predicted, to our sorrow, that it would. The book itself remains a damning, furious read, yet it comes across, mostly, as contained – peaceful, even – as bucolic as any given warhead, up until it’s armed.

Miller’s dismay at humanity’s trajectory spills across every page, but this is no screed. He’s a story-teller, and a thoughtful, crafty one, and so he buries his polemics inside a cautious tri-partite structure, along with enough Latin to make this non-Catholic take to his on-line translator (a trick that Miller, in ‘59, could only dream of).

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