The January/February issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction provides commentary on two recent Fantastic Books publications.

Up at the front of the magazine, in his Reflections column “I Didn’t Write It,” Robert Silverberg goes in depth with Jim Theis classic fantasy story “The Eye of Argon,” and also talks a bit about The Eye of Argon and the Futher Adventures of Grignr the Barbarian, edited by Michael A. Ventrella, and—surprisingly—mentions me. Silverberg writes:

It has been reprinted time and again, most recently in 2022 in a handsome paperback edition published by Fantastic Books of Brooklyn, New York, under the title of The Eye of Argon and the Further Adventures of Grignr the Barbarian.… The Eye of Argon is an extraordinary work, which connoisseurs of fantasy fiction have almost unanimously agreed is the worst work of its genre ever written. I’ve recently re-read it and I can concur with that dark accolade—adding the proviso that I found it, once again, immensely entertaining in its strange way. I commend it to you now.… Ian Randal Strock, the publisher of the recent Fantastic Books edition, has provided interleaving pages that attempt to correct the multitude of grammatical and lexical errors of the story, telling us that “swlived” should actually have been “swiveled” and “ulations” is really “ululations,” but even he is defeated by such Theisian verbal novelties as “expunisively,” “scozscetic,” and “appiesed.”… Grignr is in fact an interesting character, a ruthless barbarian through and through in the authentic Conan manner, and in a weird way we care about him as he navigates one peril after another on his path to his rendezvous with the deadly Eye of Argon. It’s easy to laugh at the comedy of errors that Theis produced, back there in 1970, but underneath all the absurdities lies a real story, silly but strangely compelling.… It is possible to see that in the new edition by reading the various Argon pastiches that have been appended to it. One of them is the real thing, Hildy Silverman’s “The Return of the Eye of Argon,” which is a perfectly good little fantasy story that replicates Theis’s innumerable errors with remarkable accuracy, but which also deftly catches the music of his imagination. Another, “Oanna’s Rock” by Jean Marie Ward, is likewise a nicely plotted heroic fantasy, but unlike Hildy Silverman she was unable to make herself strew her tale with spelling errors and goofy grammatical absurdities, so it is essentially Theis played straight, somewhat of a different kettle of fish.

Later in the issue, Peter Heck’s review column On Books looks at, among others, Alan Dean Foster’s If You Shoot the Breeze, Are You Murdering the Weather?: 100 Musings on Art and Science. Heck writes:

While each of the essays is short, Foster manages to pack a good amount of interesting information into them.… These short articles are ideal for subway, bathroom, and waiting-for-family-members-to-get-ready reading.… As the collection’s title indicates, the author’s sense of play is fully engaged here—and the fun is contagious. While it’s not strictly SF or fantasy, it gives an intriguing insight into how one of SF’s most prolific writers looks at our daily world.

These quotes are, of course, brief excerpts from much longer essays, the entireties of which I recommend to you, available in the magazine.