The infamous Chariots of the Gods was written by Erich von Däniken (1935), who died last week. Von Däniken was a Swiss author, and Chariots of the Gods was published in German in 1968. It was issued in English from Bantam in 1971, and I read it shortly thereafter, though I don’t remember where I got the copy. I would have been 13 or 14.

Von Däniken claimed early humans were visited by alien astronauts who provided them with the technology and knowledge to construct pyramids and landing fields and other megalithic structures. I believed it for several years, until further research indicated that he just made it up. Later, I found out von Däniken had a long history of theft and fraud and found myself quite angry at him for fooling me.

Fast forward to 1977, the year I graduated high school and Star Wars became a thing. Ken Bulmer, a British author who I’d never heard of at that time, used the ancient astronaut theory as a jumping off point for a trilogy of wonderful tales about Odan the Half-God, the son of a mortal woman and a space god. Odan becomes a sword and sorcery hero.

 
The backs of the DAW paperbacks punched hard in comparing Odan to Conan, but he’s more like Hercules or Gilgamesh than anything.

The backs of those paperbacks also tried hard to convince the reader that von Däniken was right, and maybe that’s why Ken Bulmer used a pseudonym to write them under — Manning Norvil.

The three books are:

Dream Chariots (1977), cover by Richard Clifton-Dey
Whetted Bronze (1978), awesome cover by Michael Whelan
Crown of the Sword God (1980), cover by Richard Hescox

I didn’t find Dream Chariots in 1977, though. It was in the 1980s before I read it, and while it was OK, it didn’t knock my socks off. Later, I picked up the sequels and found both much better, particularly the third, which drew the trilogy to a satisfying end.

I actually looked for more Manning Norvil works and found none, and only years later did I discover the Ken Bulmer connection. This trilogy is more Sword & Sorcery than S&P but it is a fun read, especially books 2 and 3.

To come back to Chariots of the Gods for a moment, that book was so phenomenally successful, though, that it spawned a cottage industry of similar books about UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, and the lost continents of Mu, Lemuria, and Atlantis. My next post is going to have a look at some of this stuff.

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Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. See all of his recent posts for Black Gate here.