George Scithers published AMRA, a leading sword and sorcery fanzine, beginning in 1959. The term "swords and sorcery" first appeared there, and AMRA became a leading proponent of the subgenre. Several of the articles originally published in AMRA were later re-printed as part of two volumes about Conan the Barbarian, which Scithers co-edited with L. Sprague de Camp. Contributors to the magazine included all the leading fantasists of the day: Poul Anderson, L. Sprague de Camp, Fritz Leiber, and many more.

George Scithers published AMRA, a leading sword and sorcery fanzine, beginning in 1959. The term "swords and sorcery" first appeared there, and AMRA became a leading proponent of the subgenre. Several of the articles originally published in AMRA were later re-printed as part of two volumes about Conan the Barbarian, which Scithers co-edited with L. Sprague de Camp. Contributors to the magazine included all the leading fantasists of the day: Poul Anderson, L. Sprague de Camp, Fritz Leiber, and many more. This volume includes work by: Darrell Schweitzer, John Boardman, L. Sprague de Camp, and more.

Speculative modernists--that is, British and American writers of science fiction, fantasy and horror during the late 19th and early 20th centuries--successfully grappled with the same forces that would drive their better-known literary counterparts to existential despair. Building on the ideas of the 19th-century Gothic and utopian movements, these speculative writers anticipated literary Modernism and blazed alternative literary trails in science, religion, ecology and sociology. Such authors as H.G. Wells and H.P. Lovecraft gained widespread recognition--budding from them, other speculative authors published fascinating tales of individuals trapped in dystopias, of anti-society attitudes, post-apocalyptic worlds and the rapidly expanding knowledge of the limitless universe. This book documents the Gothic and utopian roots of speculative fiction and explores how these authors played a crucial role in shaping the culture of the new century with their darker, more evolved themes.

Talbot Mundy's life is far from being a dull literary biography. Accounts of his adventures are often a record of lordly lies. Born William Lancaster Gribbon, he was the stereotype of the Victorian English rake. His travels and exploits -- with frequent confrontations with the law -- took him all over the world under a variety of aliases. The day after he landed in New York in 1909 Mundy was enticed into a poker game, robbed and beaten. During his recovery, he tried his hand at writing and soon became very popular. He drew heavily upon his adventures in India, the Near East and Africa as background for his fiction.

Muqarnas is sponsored by The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Muqarnas articles are being published on all aspects of Islamic visual culture, historical and contemporary, as well as articles dealing with unpublished textual primary sources.