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A Blurb Reader’s Bill of Rights

A Blurb Reader’s Bill of Rights

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I don’t know anything about the amount or quality of your reading. You might read quickly or slowly. You might be a sprinter who favors short stories or a marathoner who fearlessly commits to one multivolume series after another. You might read one book at a time or you might be the kind of degenerate who always has half a dozen going. You might read six books a year or sixty.

Whatever the nature of your reading life, though, I’ll bet that over the course of that life, you’ve read enough blurbs to make a volume as hefty as War and Peace (my copy of which does not bear a blurb. What would it even be? “If you liked Norm MacDonald’s Moth Joke, you’ll love this!” — Conan O’Brien”? It would be interesting to figure out just how long an author has to be around before blurbs are no longer considered necessary, but that’s a conundrum for another day.)

For readers, blurbs are a fact of life. They can be helpful, like a considerate stranger who gives you directions in a strange city, and they can be annoying, like mosquitoes or those people who keep calling me, offering to buy my house, and I don’t want to sell my house!

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The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part V: Lin Carter

The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part V: Lin Carter

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Lin Carter’s Under the Green Sun series (DAW Books)

I consider Edgar Rice Burroughs and Otis Adelbert Kline to be the first generation of Sword & Planet authors. Probably most widely known among the second generation — whether rightly or wrongly — is Lin Carter. Carter was an enthusiastic fellow who loved all things fantasy, including S&P and Sword & Sorcery. He promoted the genres, edited many collections of fantasy stories, and was a tremendously prolific author himself.

I’ve read 41 books by him and still have about a dozen on my TBR shelves. And that’s NOT counting the Conan books he was associated with. He was everywhere when I was growing up and our small town library had more books by him than by ERB himself.

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Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Six Bored of the Rings by Henry N. Beard & Douglas C. Kenney

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Six Bored of the Rings by Henry N. Beard & Douglas C. Kenney

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This book is predominantly concerned with making money, and from its pages a reader may learn much about the character and the literary integrity of the authors. Of boggies, however, he will discover next to nothing, since anyone in the possession of a mere moiety of his marbles will readily concede that such creatures could exist only in the minds of children of the sort whose childhoods are spent in wicker baskets and who grow up to be muggers, dog thieves, and insurance salesmen. Nonetheless, judging from the sales of Prof. Tolkien’s interesting books, this is a rather sizable group, sporting the kind of scorch marks on their pockets that only the spontaneous combustion of heavy wads of crumpled money can produce. For such readers we have collected here a few bits of racial slander concerning boggies, culled by placing Prof. Tolkien’s books on the floor in a neat pile and going over them countless times in a series of skips and short hops. For them we also include a brief description of the soon-to-be-published-if-this-incredible-dog-sells account of Dildo Bugger’s earlier adventures, called by him Travels with Goddam in Search of Lower Middle Earth, but wisely renamed by the publisher Valley of the Trolls.

from the Prologue — Concerning Boggies from Bored of the Rings

My introduction to Bored of the Rings (1969, a scatalogical, offensive, and dated, but hilarious, parody of The Lord of the Rings), came at the hands of a friend of mine, Karl H., during a Boy Scout camping trip in the late seventies. My first memory of Karl is him at 8 years old being carried kicking and yelling over the school custodian’s shoulder after he’d been caught trying to scale the back fence. Two years older than me, we stayed friends until he graduated high school in 1982. I saw him once more after that before he disappeared into the wilds of the West Coast. When first his sister, and then his mother passed away, I didn’t find out until weeks after the fact and missed both funerals and him.

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Tor Double #14: Poul Anderson’s The Saturn Game and Gregory Benford and Paul A. Carter’s Iceborn

Tor Double #14: Poul Anderson’s The Saturn Game and Gregory Benford and Paul A. Carter’s Iceborn

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Cover for The Saturn Game by NASA
Cover for Iceborn by Marx Maxwell

The Saturn Game was originally published in Analog in February, 1981. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, winning the latter. The Saturn Game is the second of three Anderson stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series after No Truce with Kings.

In 1978, Andre Norton published the novel Quag Keep, widely considered to be the first representation of role playing games in fiction. Norton’s story had a role player fall into Gary Gygax’s World of Greyhawk and live out the sort of adventures that occur in role playing games. By 1981, role playing had become more broadly established, although still niche, especially when compared to today’s popularity. In 1981, Larry Niven and Steven Barnes published Dream Park, in which an amusement park ran what were essentially Live Action Role Playing Games. In the same year, Poul Anderson published The Saturn Game, in which a fantasy role playing game was used in a variety ways on a mission to Saturn.

The Saturn Game begins in the middle of a role-playing session as Anderson’s characters are killing time during the long journey to Saturn. In this sequence, Anderson introduces the reader to the characters, both who they are and who they portray in the game. One of the intriguing things about the importance of the game to the characters is that they are living an adventure: the flight to Saturn, but still feel the need to escape into their world of adventure, although not all of the characters play the game. …

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Tor Doubles #13: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Blind Geometer and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The New Atlantis

Tor Doubles #13: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Blind Geometer and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The New Atlantis

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Cover for The New Atlantis by Michael Böhme
Cover for The Blind Geometer by Peter Gudynas

The New Atlantis was originally published in The New Atlantis and Other Novellas of Science Fiction, edited by Robert Silverberg and published by Hawthorn Books in May, 1975.  It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award and won the Locus poll.

The story opens with Le Guin’s narrator, Belle, returning home from a Wilderness Week aboard a bus where another passenger attempts to engage her in conversation, noting that a new continent is rising in the ocean, either the Atlantic or Pacific, but scientists have little information about it to go on. This exchange allows Le Guin to provide the reader with information about the climate change that is affecting her world. Manhattan underwater and parts of San Francisco are flooded.

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Third Time’s the Charm: Avram Davidson’s The Enemy of My Enemy

Third Time’s the Charm: Avram Davidson’s The Enemy of My Enemy

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We all have our favorite obscure or neglected authors, writers we get touchy about and on whose behalf we’re instantly ready to jump on top of a table, ball up our fists and yell at the top of our voices, “HEY!! Don’t forget THIS GUY!!!”

For me, Avram Davidson is at the top of that list. I’ll knock over the Parcheesi board for him any day of the week.

As is often the case with such semi-forgotten writers, he wasn’t always obscure or neglected; though never a behemoth like Heinlein, Clarke, or Bradbury, during the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s Davidson was quite well-known. He had three World Fantasy Awards to his credit, won a 1958 Hugo Award for his delightfully paranoid short story “Or All the Seas with Oysters” (read it and you’ll never turn your back on a closet full of coat hangers again) and was briefly the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Few people in the genre were more well-respected or personally beloved.

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The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part IV: Dray Prescot by Alan Burt Akers

The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part IV: Dray Prescot by Alan Burt Akers

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Dray Prescot #17-24, all from DAW: Captive Scorpio (1978), Golden Scorpio (1978),  A Life for Kregen (1979), A Sword for Kregen (1979), A Fortune for Kregen (1979), A Victory for Kregen (1980), Beasts of Antares (1980), and Rebel of Antares (1980). Covers by Josh Kirby (#17-18), Richard Hescox (#19-23), and Ken Kelly (#24)

Not only is the Dray Prescot series the longest running Sword & Planet series ever published in English, but it’s also consistently of a high quality. There are quite a few volumes that — for me—rival any of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom books. Certainly, these two series are my all-time favorites, and together make up the primary influence on my own Sword & Planet series, the five books of the Talera series by Charles Allen Gramlich (Gotta get those “three” names in there.) I’ve posted about the Talera books before, but back to Kenneth Bulmer (who wrote the Prescot series as ‘Alan Burt Akers’) and Dray Prescot now.

I’ve never been one to put a lot of emphasis on covers, but the Bladud books, all five compendiums containing the last fifteen novels, have the same cover image with just a change in the color of the dust jacket. This made me long for the original DAW publications where each vibrant cover was tied directly to the book it illustrated.

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Pseudoplumes, Nom de Nyms, Birds, & Oooze: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Language of the Night

Pseudoplumes, Nom de Nyms, Birds, & Oooze: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Language of the Night

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The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin
(trade paperback reprint from Perigee Books, 1980). Cover by Michael Mariano

I’m not a big fan of literary criticism in any field (although I have committed some), but one of my big books from my late teens onward was Le Guin’s The Language of the Night (1979), especially for the essays “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” and “A Citizen of Mondath.”

Le Guin has some great passages in “Citizen” about what she liked to read as a kid, and how she liked it.

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Tor Doubles #12: Roger Zelazny’s He Who Shapes and Kate Wilhelm’s The Infinity Box

Tor Doubles #12: Roger Zelazny’s He Who Shapes and Kate Wilhelm’s The Infinity Box

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Cover for He Who Shapes by Wayne Barlowe
Cover for The Infinity Box by Royo

He Who Shapes was originally serialized in Amazing Stories between January and February, 1965. It won the Nebula Award, tying with Brian W. Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree, which appeared as half of Tor Double #3. He Who Shapes is the first of three Zelazny stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series. Zelazny’s original title for the story was The Ides of Octember, which was changed before its initial publication. He eventually expanded the novella to the novel length The Dream Master and the original title was used on the story when it was reprinted in 2018 in the collection The Magic.

The story focuses on Charles Render, a neuroparticipant therapist, and drops the reader into a session, in which Render is creating a reality for his patient, in which the patient is Julius Caesar in a world in which the assassins kill Marcus Antonius while Caesar/the patient longs for martyrdom. Following the session, Zelazny introduces Render and his techniques to the reader in a manner which leaves no room to doubt that Render may be adept and the technical part of what he does. But his bedside manner leaves much to be desired.

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The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part III: Michael Moorcock, Michael Resnick, and Robert E. Howard

The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part III: Michael Moorcock, Michael Resnick, and Robert E. Howard

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The Warrior of Mars trilogy by Michael Moorcock: Warriors of Mars (DAW, January 1979), Blades of Mars (as by Edward P. Bradbury; Lancer, 1966), and Barbarians of Mars (DAW, March 1979). Covers by Richard Hescox, Gray Morrow, and Richard Hescox

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.

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