Quite a few writers who went on to bigger names in other genres wrote some of their earliest books in Sword & Planet. Michael Moorcock was one of these. He’s mostly known for his Elric series. Elric is a kind of anti-Conan. But in 1964, at around the age of 25, he wrote three Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiches set on Mars. In the introduction to a later release of these books he mentioned his early infatuation with ERB, and that after the publication of the first Elric book he was asked by another publisher to do a fantasy series for them.

He offered several possible author names and titles, and the books were published in 1965 under the name Edward Powys Bradbury as Warriors of Mars, Blades of Mars, and Barbarians of Mars. Later they were republished as City of the Beast, Lord of the Spiders, and Masters of the Pit under his own name. The hero is an earthman named Michael Kane and the adventures are very ERBian.

[Click the images for more fundamental versions.]

Moorcock indicates that he wrote all three books in a week, and it shows. They’re short books, less than 160 pages in paperback, but they certainly show signs of haste. They read almost like bare bones versions of Barsoom books.

Still, they are fun and Moorcock was a good enough writer to make them entertaining. I’m absolutely sure that I couldn’t have done this well in a week.

Michael Resnick is another well-known author who cut his teeth on S&P fiction. He died in 2020 but had won several Hugos and a Nebula award for his Science Fiction. In 1967 and 1968, however, at the age of twenty-five, he had an S&P duology published set on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon.

These were his first two published mainstream novels, although he also apparently wrote quite a few adult erotic novels around this time. (I haven’t seen any of those.) The books were The Goddess of Ganymede and Pursuit on Ganymede. They had cool covers and were fun books.

Robert E. Howard (1906 — 1936) was a contemporary of first-generation S&P writers ERB and Otis Adelbert Kline. He was born after them but died before, of a self-inflicted gunshot at age thirty, after an exhausting marathon caring for his dying mother, who he was told that day would never recover consciousness. (She didn’t.) REH, as he is often known, was publishing at the same time as ERB and OAK, but in S&P he is mostly a footnote.

Let me hasten to add that I say this not to diminish REH. He’s one of my favorite writers and I credit him as the inventor of a particular fantasy genre called Sword and Sorcery, or S&S, of which the Conan and Kull stories are the prototypes. But, in S&P, REH’s contribution hangs on one book, a book only published after his death and which the evidence suggests he didn’t even finish. The story was serialized in Weird Tales Magazine in 1939 and published in paperback by Ace Books in 1964. Here is the speculation on the mystery of Almuric!

Almuric (Ace, 1970). Cover by Jeff Jones

Howard was believed to be working on Almuric in 1936, the year of his death, although some suggest he may have begun work as early as 1932. It’s also known that he owned books by Burroughs, including several of the Martian series. It seems likely to me, although I can’t prove it, that Howard began the book at the behest of Otis Adelbert Kline, who was REH’s literary agent from 1933 to his death. Kline, of course, had written S&P himself and knew the popularity of ERB’s Barsoom stories. As an agent, he might certainly encourage Howard to write something with great sales potential.

Howard apparently stopped working on Almuric before his death, however, and no doubt the combined whammy of his mother’s final illness and the breakup with his girlfriend — Novalyne Price Ellis — contributed to that. It has long been noted that the last part of the book, particularly in the last chapter, seems to change styles rather dramatically, and the ending reads very much like an S&P book that ERB or OAK might have written, but not one that fits Howard’s style.

Almuric (New English Library, March 1971). Cover by Richard Clifton-Dey

Initially, I believed Kline himself had finished the book to sell it. Another possibility was that Farnsworth Wright, the editor for Weird Tales when the book was serialized there, might have finished it. I think that highly unlikely, given that Wright was not much of a writer himself and was not known for doing heavy edits on stories.

However, an independent scholar named Morgan Holmes came up with a different theory, which I now believe to be true. He concluded, based on some circumstantial evidence and on some analysis of the vocabulary terms used in the ending, that Otto Binder completed the book. Binder worked for Kline’s agency at that time and was a successful writer himself. He used certain terms in his published work that appear in Almuric, while those terms do not appear in other work written by Howard.

(Covers for the volumes above by Chris Achilleos on left and Ken Kelly on right).

The previous articles in The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet series are:

Part I: Donald Wollheim, Edwin L. Arnold, and Otis Adelbert Kline
Part II: John Norman

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Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for Black Gate was a Part II of The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet.