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Ancient Worlds: What Kind Of Book Is This, Anyway?

Ancient Worlds: What Kind Of Book Is This, Anyway?

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Oh no, I admit it. I'm judging this book by the cover. And its title. And the fact that it's a part of a series about time traveling viking navy SEALs. I'm not making any part of that up. But I am judging the holy hell out of it.
Oh no, I admit it. I’m judging this book by the cover. And its title. And the fact it’s part of a series about time traveling viking navy SEALs. Not making any part of that up. But I am judging the holy hell outta it.

We all know the old adage “Never judge a book by its cover.” But when it comes to literal application, we all do. That’s because our book culture encourages it. The cover won’t always tell us much about the quality of a book, true, but if we want to know what kind of book it is, the cover is where we find out.

Shirtless guy holding woman in historically inaccurate clothing in highly improbable position? Romance.

Shirtless guy flexing while holding sword (with or without scantily clad woman clinging to his knees)? Heroic fantasy.

Woman scantily clad while still wearing a lot of black leather with a sword, possibly straddling a motorcycle? Urban fantasy. Probably.

Genre is how the publisher knows what kind of cover to put on a book. It’s also how the reader knows, more or less, what to expect when they pick a novel up. If you buy a book with a silhouette of a tank on the cover and get a story that is 90% romance, you’re going to be perplexed.

The same was true of ancient books, although the cues were given in different ways.

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Rogues Gallery

Rogues Gallery

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gamestoreThe first roleplaying game product I bought for myself – using money given to me by my grandmother for Christmas 1979 – was the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. I ordered it through the Sears catalog, because, to my 10 year-old mind, that’s what you did when you wanted to buy something “unusual” (which D&D was to me at that time). The thought never occurred to me to look for the book anywhere else, since I didn’t recall ever seeing any RPG products on the shelves of the shops and stores I usually visited.

As convenient as the Sears catalog was, its selection was limited, as I learned after admiring the collection of D&D materials owned by the high school-age older brother of a good friend. This older brother was one of my mentors in the hobby, who initiated me into its mysteries at an impressionable age. He’d acquired his books, adventure modules, and magazines from hobby and comic book shops throughout suburban Baltimore and spoke enticingly about the many other treasures they held. Needless to say, I wanted to visit some of these shops myself.

By the summer of 1980, there were quite a few places selling roleplaying games in my neck of the woods, including chain bookstores (like Walden and B. Dalton) and even greeting card stores. The number of dedicated game stores, though, was quite small. It’d still be a few more years before they started to become, if not commonplace, at least easier to find. Consequently, I became a very loyal customer to those I did find, often hanging out at these places with my friends. And why wouldn’t I? Not only did they have shelves of D&D and other RPGs I’d never heard of, but they also had dice and fanzines and miniature figures. Several of them even had a space or room where people could sit down and play. In many ways, those public gaming spaces held even more appeal to me than everything else, because they gave me a chance to see roleplayers “in the wild” – and what a cast of characters they were!

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A Perfect Artifact from the Glory Days of 1970s Swords & Sorcery: Keith Taylor’s Bard

A Perfect Artifact from the Glory Days of 1970s Swords & Sorcery: Keith Taylor’s Bard

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oie_520266yr2OCRWhAfter several weeks spent among ghoulish haunts, a Cthulhu-haunted island, and nightmare dimensions, I thought a trip to ancient Britain — the sun-dappled forests of the High Weald and the rolling downs of the Vale of Kent — was needed. Yes, I’ve visited previously in reviews of Henry Treece’s The Great Captains and David Drake’s The Dragonlord, and Keith Taylor’s Bard (1981) is a return to post-Roman Britain in the days of Arthur and Saxon and Jutish invaders.

Bard is one of those books that my dad bought years ago and I never bothered to read. I didn’t know anything about it or its author, but I was done with my short-lived infatuation with Celtic fantasy. Nothing about it enticed me to pick it up… until I started blogging about swords & sorcery.

As I read articles and websites on heroic fiction, I quickly learned that Keith Taylor was an important voice in the field of Robert E. Howard scholarship and then I started seeing very good reviews of Bard. I remembered that a copy was tucked away in the attic so I went and retrieved it and I’m quite glad I did.

Bard is a fix-up of four previously published stories and one original tale about Felimid mac Fal of Eire, wielder of the magic sword, Kincaid, and player of the ancient harp, Golden Singer. Under the right circumstances, the harp allows him to cast spells and play songs to influence his audience. Blessed with talent, wit, and cunning, Felimid is able to enter the courts of ferocious Jutish warlords and survive encounters with monsters and sorcerers in haunted forests.

Though tied together by a pair of ongoing plots, Bard reads more like the scattered adventures of a peripatetic traveler than a novel. Despite its melancholic setting in a time of fading magic and invaders from across the sea, this book is tremendous fun. Felimid is a bold, lively character with a winning way, well worth any heroic fantasy reader’s time.

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Vintage Treasures: Science Fiction of the 30’s edited by Damon Knight

Vintage Treasures: Science Fiction of the 30’s edited by Damon Knight

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Science Fiction of the 30s-smallWindy City Pulp and Paper is a fabulous convention and, as its name implies, it’s focused mostly on vintage magazines and paperbacks. Wandering the vast Dealer’s Room is like stepping into a Cave of Wonders for fans of pulp science fiction and fantasy.

But it’s also a den of surprises and a pleasant one awaited me while browsing a table piled high with pulps and digest magazines. A hand-written sign proclaimed all items were “3 For $10,” so I decided to spend a few minutes exploring the heaped stacks. Buried under a loose pile of Science Fiction Quarterly magazines and Amazing Stories, I found a lone hardcover volume: Damon Knight’s pulp anthology Science Fiction of the 30’s, in much better shape than my tattered copy.

Well, that was certainly worth $3.33. It didn’t take much effort to find two other worthy treasures (a July 1948 Fantastic Novels pulp with a classic Lawrence cover and the January 1956 issue of The Original Science Fiction Stories with a James Blish cover story, which looked like it had just come off the magazine rack.) I plunked down my ten bucks and fled before the vendor changed his mind.

Science Fiction of the 30’s was one of two great pulp anthologies I read over thirty years ago — the other being of course Isaac Asimov’s marvelous Before the Golden Age. Those books, together with Jacques Sadoul’s art book 2000 A.D. Illustrations From the Golden Age of Science Fiction Pulps, ignited a love of pulp fiction in me as a young teen that never died.

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In Pursuit Of the Dragons Of Britain

In Pursuit Of the Dragons Of Britain

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The "Munitions Dragon" at the Tower of London.
The “Munitions Dragon” at the Tower of London.

As some few of you may know, I recently abandoned my luxurious offices in Black Gate’s sprawling Indiana Compound and have set my course by a wandering star. My prime objective (if not my Prime Directive) is to find a real, live dragon.

So far, no go. On the plus side, I have found definite signs of dragons in all quarters of my British hunting grounds. In fact, if carvings and statuary are any guide, dragons remain downright popular and have been so for centuries. Surely their real life counterparts cannot be far afield? Lurking just over the next moor, I should think, spitting flame and devouring maidens.

The most remarkable thing about dragons is how they induce credulity. Dragon fans become, with time, less like a fine aged wine and instead rather like my old friend Fox Mulder: against all reason, we want to believe. Maybe firedrakes and so on don’t exist –– maybe I’m off on a wild goose chase, and I should scarper back to the Indiana Compound forthwith –– but having grown up on Smaug, Quok, and the Reluctant Dragon, I find that I run along on fumes of faith. Dragons are simply too magical to track them with anything less than full-bore belief.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: A Man Called Spade

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: A Man Called Spade

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Spade_FalconbookIn last week’s column, I mentioned The Maltese Falcon, starring Humphrey Bogart. (Did you follow instructions and watch it for the first time?) Over eighty years after its publication, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon stands supreme today as the finest private eye novel ever written. Bogie’s 1941 film proved that the third time is a charm, prior attempts in 1931 and 1936 having failed.

Sam Spade, the quintessential tough guy shamus, appeared in a five-part serial of The Maltese Falcon in Black Mask in 1929. Hammett carefully reworked the pieces into novel form for publication by Alfred E. Knopf in 1930 and detective fiction would have a benchmark that has yet to be surpassed.

Hammett, who wrote over two dozen stories featuring a detective known as The Continental Op (well worth reading), never intended to write more about Samuel Spade, saying he was “done with him” after completing the book-length tale.

But the public wanted more and his agent cajoled him into cranking out three more short stories featuring Spade. The first two appeared in American Magazine and the third in Collier’s in 1932 and they were collected into book form later that year as The Adventures of Sam Spade and Other Stories. In 1999, Vintage Crime published Nightmare Town, a compilation of twenty Hammett stories, including all three Spade short stories.

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Washington Attorney General Files Suit Against Ed Nash for Kickstarter Fraud

Washington Attorney General Files Suit Against Ed Nash for Kickstarter Fraud

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Asylum Kickstarter cards-smallIn a surprising move, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed a suit Thursday against Ed Nash and his game company Altius Management for Kickstarter Fraud.

I can’t recall a single instance of a Kickstarter creator being sued for non-delivery of a project, but some in the industry have been forecasting this for months — particularly in the face of recent high-profile Kickstarter failures such as John Campbell’s notorious Sad Pictures for Children and Erik Chevalier’s The Doom That Came To Atlantic City.

Here’s a summary of the suit from GeekWire:

Back in October 2012, Nash raised $25,146 from 810 backers — including at least 31 from Washington — for a playing card game called Asylum designed by a Serbian artist and managed by Nash. The campaign exceeded its funding goal of $15,000, meaning Nash was legally responsible for sending every backer the products they paid for. But as the estimated delivery date of December 2012 passed, customers never received their Asylum product. In the months following, angry backers voiced their frustration on the ongoing Kickstarter page comment thread.

“Almost a year and no updates,” one backer wrote. “Ed Nash is in hiding.”

Read the complete article here.

Announcing the Winner of the Laurence Manning Giveaway

Announcing the Winner of the Laurence Manning Giveaway

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Man Who Awoke 1st edIn my recent review of Laurence Manning’s The Man Who Awoke, I ran a giveaway for a copy of the book, in which the winner would be determined by who best answered the question “Why is pulp era science fiction and fantasy still relevant today?”

I had intended to respond to the entries to generate some discussion, as well as posting a reminder. Then Murphy stopped by for an extended visit, and none of those things happened before the deadline.

However, we had two good entries. The first was from Anthony Simeone. Here’s an excerpt from his answer:

In genre fiction above all other forms of literature, writers act as living lenses, through which we can see the world in a different way. That is one of the great blessings of the passage of time and death: we get to see the world afresh with each passing year, and through each new person that walks the Earth. Fiction, the written word, are telepathic messages sent forward in time for us to experience and enjoy. Ultimately, they are voices from the void of the past, without which the years behind us would be tragically silent.

The other entry was from Daniel J. Davis. Here’s some of what he had to say.

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Self Published Book Review: The Book of Thoth by Paul Leone

Self Published Book Review: The Book of Thoth by Paul Leone

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If you have a book you’d like me to review, please see the submission guidelines here.

Book_of_ThothConsidering my dislike of vampires, I seem to review a lot of books about them. Either vampires are hard to avoid or I just can’t help myself. Paul Leone’s The Book of Thoth is part of his Vatican Vampire Hunters series. As you might guess by the name of the series, Mr. Leone does not shy away from religious themes. Or vampires. In his series, vampires are literally demons escaped from Hell, occupying the bodies of the dead. This explains why they so hate and fear anything sacred, whether it be holy water, crucifixes, churches, or even the blood of the righteous.

Nicole van Wyck is an heiress who has no interest in going into the family business and who is rapidly losing interest in the clubs and parties all her friends are involved in. Her life is threatening to become the aimless drifting of so many of the rich and irresponsible. That is, until she friends meets her first vampire. Fortunately for her, the vampire is being tracked by a group of church-sponsored hunters, who chase it away with no one the wiser. Except for Nicole, who suspects that there’s more going on than the friends who are with her realize. When she does track down the hunters, they make her an offer to join them and Nicole concludes that if vampires are real, then fighting them is not optional.

Nicole is certainly not another vapid heiress. She works hard, whether tracking down a mystery or training to fight vampires. She also has a strong moral center, which comes through both in how readily she leaps into the fight and in how she is willing to argue against her own team when they cross the line. Nicole is certainly a capable heroine, but she and her fellow hunters are not facing run of the mill vampires, but a veritable count of Hell, Count d’Aubert, and his very dangerous minion, Alice. The demons in dead flesh are after the titular Book of Thoth, which holds the secrets of Satan himself. To do that, they must gather three keys to open up the book’s hiding place.

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Against the Giants of Chaos: Shadowdale: The Scouring of the Land

Against the Giants of Chaos: Shadowdale: The Scouring of the Land

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Shadowdale the Scouring of the Land-smallLast month, I took a look at the the first Third Edition D&D Cormyr supplement, Cormyr: The Tearing of the Weave, released in March 2007. It was a 160-page mega-adventure detailing a vast and sinister conspiracy deep in the Realms, and the first installment of what would eventually be a three-part supermodule.

I wasn’t aware Cormyr was part of a series while I was bidding like a fiend in the front row of the Spring Games Plus Auction. It was just one of several Forgotten Realms products I won, and all I knew at the time was that it was in brand new condition and criminally cheap – probably because it was released for version 3.5 and now was nearly two versions out of date.

So after I read through Cormyr and discovered I had just one third of an epic story line, I went scrambling through the rest of my auction winnings to see if I’d also scored any other parts of the saga. Luckily, I quickly found Part II: Shadowdale: The Scouring of the Land, which picks up the thread and hurtles our adventurers deep into the newly-conquered land of Shadowdale.

Shadowdale lies conquered! Who can free this oppressed land?

Zhentish soldiers, Maerimydran drow, and Sharran cultist have forged a dark alliance to subjugate the peaceful land of Shadowdale. Elminster’s tower lies in ruins, Lord Amcathra governs at the sufferance of the dale’s conquerors, and the very Weave of magic in this embattled land seems to fray with each passing day. The Zhentish yoke lies heavy over Shadowdale — but the Dalesfolk are ready to fight for their freedom, if only they can find true heroes to lead the way!

This Forgotten Realms campaign adventure is designed for characters of levels 9-13. It can be played as a stand-alone adventure or as the second adventure in a three-part series. Each encounter contains tactical information for the Dungeon Master and expanded map features for ease of play.

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