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Atlantis, Vikings, and the Hordes of Kublai Khan: Merlin’s Ring by H. Warner Munn: Part II

Atlantis, Vikings, and the Hordes of Kublai Khan: Merlin’s Ring by H. Warner Munn: Part II

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terrortales-smallTime to come clean! When I published Part 1 of my review of Merlin’s Ring last year, it was not because the article was so massive that it had to be broken down into smaller parts. Rather, it’s because I was unable to finish the book promptly, and soon enough unforeseen circumstances left me deprived of my copy, wondering what happened to Gwalchmai and Corenice. John O’Neill suggested I proceed with what I had, and commit to completing the review later.

A replacement book was not an easy find. Mr Munn’s works are like hens teeth where I live. Honestly I have only ever, quite recently, come across one in a second hand book shop – alas it was The King of the World’s Edge, which is the book that caused me to seek out Merlin’s Ring in the first place!

Well, thanks to the internet and a service called Alibris, I finally received a replacement volume from Floridas. Not in as good a nick as my previous, pristine volume, but it is the first printing Ballantine version, which I suppose is something.

Part 1 of my review left off where Gwalchmai had joined forces with Joan of Arc, and became part of the army set to liberate Orleans. One has to appreciate the admiration for St Joan that Mr Munn must have had. His passion for the subject is strong, and the resultant detail a joy to read. My own knowledge of Joan of Arc has (until now) been somewhat sketchy. Pretty much the basics: when she lived, that she was burned as a heretic, and there have been a few recent movies about her.

While I can’t say whether Munn’s account is historically accurate, at least the recent movies have acquainted me with the subject of Joan of Arc. Munn’s Secondary characters are detailed and believable, with small quirks that can easily be believed. One example is Master Jean, the best marksman in France when it comes to the “hand cannon” (predecessor to a harquebus). The secret to his skill is cleverly woven into the plot, something rather mundane by today’s standards but so revolutionary, and risky, for a gunner in those days.

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New Treasures: Things From Outer Space, edited by Hank Davis

New Treasures: Things From Outer Space, edited by Hank Davis

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things-from-outer-space-smallHank Davis is my kind of editor. He’s one of the very few out there still mining pulps and science fiction digest magazines and packaging them up for a modern audience, in terrific books like In Space No One Can Hear You Scream (2013) and The Baen Big Book of Monsters (2014). In short, he’s one of the only folks introducing the work of Edmond Hamilton, John W. Campbell, Clifford D. Simak, Randall Garrett, Fritz Leiber and others to a modern audience — or at least, one of the very few doing it in affordable mass market editions, which is the way I discovered all those great wrters, mummnly-mumble decades ago.

Things From Outer Space is Hank’s latest, an original paperback collecting tales of “Mostly very, very bad things that want to harm humans and destroy Earth. Or take it for their own. Original stories and reprints of classics from the scary side of science fiction!” Here’s the description.

THE THINGS ARE COMING…

As we all know, in space, no one can hear you scream. Which doesn’t mean that anyone is safe just because they’re standing on the soil of planet Earth, because if a thing from out there drops in, screaming probably won’t save you.

Earth has spawned myriad unpleasant life forms which are bad news for humans, ranging in size from the Ebola virus to the great white shark up to the Tyrannosaurus Rex (extinct, fortunately for us) — and that’s just one planet. What even more deadly life forms might the billions of planets in our galaxy have spawned? And suppose the things are intelligent and capable of crossing space and coming here . . .

Considering that very possibility are the masters of science fiction starring in this book, including Robert Silverberg, David Drake, Sarah A. Hoyt, James H. Schmitz, Fritz Leiber, Robert Sheckley, Murray Leinster and John W. Campbell, as well as classic stories of extraterrestrial horrors by H.P. Lovecraft, George Allan England and more.

E.T. might have been happy eating Reese’s Pieces, but other visitors from the void might have less dainty appetites. And there are probably worse things than merely being eaten…

Alas, description notwithstanding, there is no contribution from Murray Leinster. But there are twenty stories of nasty alien creatures, new and old. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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Modular: An Interview with Jeffrey Talanian, the Creator and Publisher of Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea

Modular: An Interview with Jeffrey Talanian, the Creator and Publisher of Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea

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hyperborea2ecoverThis November 3-5 I had the pleasure of attending the fourth iteration of Gamehole Con in lovely Madison, Wisconsin. At the con I had the additional pleasure of sitting down at Jeffrey Talanian’s table to play an Amazonian Fighter in Jeff’s Lovecraftian adventure “The Rats in the Walls”. I’m not going to give away spoilers here, but the creepy escapade had more to it than rats in walls! And, despite Jeff’s best attempts to kill us, our party overcame its antagonists in an epic last battle of first-level proportions! If you can’t tell from my exclamation points, it was great fun!

Jeff’s “The Rats in the Walls” takes place in the City-State of Khromarium. This is an area in Hyperborea, which is the official campaign setting for Jeff’s own roleplaying game that is published by North Wind Adventures. The second edition of Jeff’s game currently is 365% funded on Kickstarter with nine days left to go! After our game, Jeff graciously agreed to an interview with me. Here it is:

What is AS&SH?

AS&SH stands for Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea, a role-playing game of swords, sorcery, and weird fantasy. It is a tabletop RPG inspired by the fiction of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith. Its rules are inspired by the works of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax. AS&SH was released in 2012 as a boxed set. In 2013, it was nominated for several ENnie awards (Best Game, Best Production Values, Product of the Year), and in 2017 it will be rereleased in Second Edition hardback format.

Why did you create a game specific to the flavor of these writers and these genres? Did this grow out of what they call a “homebrew” game? If so, please tell us about that game and exactly how it resulted in AS&SH?

Growing up, I greatly admired fantasy, science fiction, and horror. I started reading genre fiction at a very young age (most notably the Conan paperbacks, The Hobbit, and The Chronicles of Narnia). I also got into comic books and magazines; Savage Sword of Conan and The Mighty Thor were my favorites. I also devoured sword-and-sorcery themed cartoons and films. I never missed an episode of Thundarr the Barbarian, and films like Conan the Barbarian, The Beastmaster, Hawk the Slayer, and Krull really captured my imagination in those halcyon days. I loved Tolkien, and read Lord of the Rings in the sixth grade, but for me it was always the grittier, more personal tales that I’ve loved most: Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum, Tarzan, John Carter, Carson Napier, Doc Savage, Gray Mouser, etc.

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Invaders of Pluto, and Brain Stealers of Mars: Rich Horton on The Ultimate Weapon and The Planeteers by John W. Campbell

Invaders of Pluto, and Brain Stealers of Mars: Rich Horton on The Ultimate Weapon and The Planeteers by John W. Campbell

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When I was twelve years old I read a book that changed my life. It was Before the Golden Age, a collection of Isaac Asimov’s favorite pulp tales from his own early teen years, and it inspired in me a love of the pulps that endures to this day.

One of the most captivating stories was John W. Campbell’s “The Brain Stealers of Mars,” from the December 1936 Thrilling Wonder Stories. The intrepid explorers Penton and Blake use an atomic-powered craft to visit Mars, where they find a sinister race of shapeshifters, eager to hitch a ride back to Earth. Sort of a prototype for “Who Goes There?”, the far more famous tale which Campbell published two years later in Astounding, “Brain Stealers” is more a science fiction puzzler than a true horror story, as our blaster-wielding heroes must find a way to outsmart an entire race of scheming telepathic shapeshifters with designs on conquest.

The Planeteers is a collection of five Penton & Blake tales published in Thrilling Wonder between 1936-38, following their adventures as they explore the solar system in their gleaming atomic spacecraft, discovering the double-minded aliens of Callisto, a benign race on Europa, and the super-intelligent energy eater out beyond Pluto. It appeared as half of an Ace Double in 1966, paired with The Ultimate Weapon, a standalone tale of the desperate race against time to create super-weapons on the Moon to thwart an alien invasion.

Rich Horton reviewed both books on his blog Strange at Ecbatan back in June. Here’s what he thought.

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The New Pulp Era: Ghostwriting, Ebooks, and the Economics of Now

The New Pulp Era: Ghostwriting, Ebooks, and the Economics of Now

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I'm going to say absolutely nothing about that sword.
I’m going to say absolutely nothing about that sword.

A lot of writers and readers are saying we have entered a new pulp era, a repeat of those days when hardworking writers pumped out exciting fiction in large quantities while facing very tight deadlines. The old pulp era died long ago, and was replaced with modern traditional publishing. Under that model, writers usually only came out with a book a year, and if they did more than that it was generally under a pseudonym. Traditional houses seem to have been under the impression that “less is more” when it came to a writer’s output.

Readers disagree. They want more from their favorite authors, and they want it now. Those writers who have come to the top of the new indie publishing revolution tend to be those who write a lot, generally in series, and keep up a consistent quality. Some traditionally published writers such as Guy Haley are moving that direction too. In our interview with him, he talked about how he has to write five novels a year if he wants to make a living at his writing.

Even superstars such as James Patterson are getting in on the game. A post at Non-Fiction Novelist talks about how Patterson’s new project “Book Shots” fits perfectly into the pulp mentality. These thrillers and romances are touted as having lots of action and no padding, just like a good pulp story should. They’re all under 150 pages and cost less than $5. Plus there’s a whole lot of them.

I’m seeing a similar trend in online start-up publishers. My own body of indie published work, while doing OK, is not bringing me enough to live on, so I make up the deficiency by ghostwriting. This is a relatively new venture for me as I shift steadily away from nonfiction writing, but the trend I’m seeing is remarkable.

Ghostwriting always involves a strict written agreement not to take credit for a work, so what follows will by necessity be of a general nature.

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Space Barbarians and Uranium Mining on Mars: Rich Horton on Empire of the Atom by A. E. Van Vogt and Space Station #1 by Frank Belknap Long

Space Barbarians and Uranium Mining on Mars: Rich Horton on Empire of the Atom by A. E. Van Vogt and Space Station #1 by Frank Belknap Long

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It’s been a month or two since I’ve been able to make time for some classic pulp SF. But over at his website Strange at Ecbatan, Rich Horton has piqued my interest in a 1957 Ace Double, pairing A.E. van Vogt’s Empire of the Atom and Space Station #1 by Frank Belknap Long. Here’s Rich:

I approached Empire of the Atom with some caution. It is another “fix-up”, though a fairly coherent one, comprising five novelettes first published in Astounding in 1946 and 1947. It was published in hardcover by Shasta in 1957, followed the same year by this abridged Ace Double edition…. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised…

It is set some 10,000 years in the future, after humans have colonized the planets of the Solar System, and then been reduced to barbarism on each of these worlds. A city-state, Linn, arose, and in the recent past it conquered the world and began to try to annex the barbarians on Venus, Mars, and even outer satellites such as Europa. The ruler, or Lord Leader, is a vigorous man but getting older. A new child is born to his scheming second wife, Lydia. (These are, of course, analogues to Augustus and Livia.) The new baby, named Clane, turns out to be a mutant — Lydia was accidentally exposed to radiation — this society uses radioactive metals (and worships the “Atom Gods”) but has no idea how they work. As a mutant Clane should be killed. However, a leading Temple Scientist wants to raise him and show that mutants, if treated properly, have the same potential as anyone. So Clane is raised, somewhat isolated, and becomes an unusual but very intelligent young man… There is a sequel, The Wizard of Linn, serialized in Astounding in 1950.

Empire of the Atom was one of Van Vogt’s most popular novels, with over a dozen editions from multiple publishers over the next four decades.

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Rich Playboys, Mad Scientists, and Venusian Monsters: The Best of Stanley Weinbaum

Rich Playboys, Mad Scientists, and Venusian Monsters: The Best of Stanley Weinbaum

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The Best of Stanley G WeinbaumA few short years ago, here at Black Gate, John O’Neill did several posts on Del Rey’s Classic Science Fiction series. Those posts were loving, nostalgic homages.

I have never been a huge sci-fi book fan. Fantasy and horror are more my thing. Yet, I found those posts really intriguing, especially the cool covers. I had read some of the stories of certain of these writers, but by and large John’s posts introduced me to most of these authors for the first time. After reading a couple, I was hooked and eventually tracked them all down through eBay and Abebooks.

As a newcomer to these books, and to many of these authors, I thought I would give a review of each. As with John’s original posts, I hope these reviews inspire some newer readers to seek out some of these older treasures, or at least to track down some other works by these authors.

Before reviewing our first volume, let’s get a little background on this series. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (isfdb.org) refers to these books as Ballantine’s Classic Library of Science Fiction. However, I can’t find that designation on any of the books so I’ll simply refer to them as “Del Rey’s” (an imprint of Ballantine) “Classic Science Fiction” series, just like the covers say. This series began in the early seventies and continued to be published up through the eighties, sometimes with multiple printings of certain volumes. There were twenty-two books published in all.

Each book in this series was a collection of short stories highlighting a single author within the Del Rey publishing fold. According to John O’Neill, this was one way for Del Rey to promote the authors in their stable (especially de Camp, Eric Frank Russell, and others). That’s why there are no volumes dedicated to Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, etc. None of those “big guns” were Del Rey authors. That’s not to say that there weren’t some heavy hitters in this series though. Writers like Philip K. Dick and Fritz Leiber, to name only two, have dedicated collections within.

I thought it might be best to go through this series in chronological order of publication. Each post will focus on one volume. My main goal is try to give some brief reviews of some of the stories within, at least those that struck me as the most enjoyable, but I’ll also give my overall impressions about the book, and writer, as a whole.

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Phileas Fogg Finds Immortality

Phileas Fogg Finds Immortality

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51dx9hyli-lchapbook-cover-jpegWhen Jules Verne created gentleman adventurer Phileas Fogg in his 1873 novel, Around the World in Eighty Days, he had no way of imagining the bizarre turn his character’s chronicles would take a century later. When Philip Jose Farmer added The Other Log of Phileas Fogg to his Wold Newton Family series in 1973, he had no way of imagining that four decades later there would exist a Wold Newton specialty publisher to continue the esoteric literary exploits of some of the last two centuries’ most fantastic characters.

Farmer’s concept, in a nutshell, is that Verne’s globetrotting adventure is part of a far larger extraterrestrial conflict between two powerful alien races, the Eridani and the Capellas. Phileas Fogg was raised by the Eridani it turns out and, in the course of Farmer’s work, we learn that Verne’s Captain Nemo (the anti-hero of his 1870 classic, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and its 1874 sequel, The Mysterious Island) is not only a Capellan agent, but is also the same man known as Professor Moriarty in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries.

Josh Reynolds was the first author to follow in Farmer’s footsteps in a substantial fashion when he authored two direct sequels to The Other Log of Phileas Fogg for Meteor House: 2014’s Phileas Fogg and the War of Shadows and 2016’s Phileas Fogg and the Heart of Osra. Both books are set in 1889 and see Phileas Fogg coming out of retirement as the extraterrestrial conflict between the Eridani and the Capellas reaches Earth once more. The second of these titles involves Ruritania, the fictitious country from Anthony Hope’s Ruritanian Romances trilogy that began with the famous 1894 novel, The Prisoner of Zenda.

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Exploring the Leonaur Science Fiction and Fantasy Catalog

Exploring the Leonaur Science Fiction and Fantasy Catalog

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I first discovered Leonaur Books when I went looking for in-print editions of Stanley G. Weinbaum, the pulp author who died in 1935. Leonaur has virtually his entire science fiction output in print in four handsome and affordable paperbacks. How cool is that? Shortly thereafter, I found Leonaur has a back catalog with enormous appeal to pulp fans, including the complete Arcot, Morey & Wade space opera stories of John W. Campbell, Jr, Guy Boothby’s Dr. Nikola tales, and collections by Homer Eon Flint, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert E. Howard, Arthur Sellings, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, and many others.

These guys are clearly serious about vintage fantasy and SF. But they don’t just do single-author collections. Over the past few years they’ve also assembled some top-notch original anthologies as part of their extensive Supernatural Fiction Series, like the two volume Leonaur Book of Supernatural Detectives, edited by Morgan Tyler, which contains “The Door Into Infinity” by Edmond Hamilton, a Carnacki tale by William Hope Hodgson, and stories by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Richard Marsh, Gordon McCreagh, Enoch F. Gerrish, and two dozen more.

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New Treasures: Ancient Egyptian Supernatural Tales edited by Jonathan E. Lewis

New Treasures: Ancient Egyptian Supernatural Tales edited by Jonathan E. Lewis

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Here’s a fun little artifact, eminently suitable for late summer reading: Jonathan E. Lewis’s anthology of classic (and pulp) Egyptian dark fantasies, Ancient Egyptian Supernatural Tales, published in trade paperback in July as part of the Stark House Supernatural Classics line.

Lewis has done a fine job assembling a stellar line-up of dark fantasy and horror stories featuring mummies, curses, ancient Egyptian vampires, and lots more. In addition to classic tales from Edgar Allan Poe, Louisa May Alcott, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, and Sax Rohmer, there’s a quartet of stories from Weird Tales (by Frank Belknap Long, E. Hoffmann Price, John Murray Reynolds — and Tennessee Williams!), Algernon Blackwood’s novella “A Descent Into Egypt,” and two excerpts: one from the first mummy novel ever written in English, Jane Webb Loudon’s The Mummy (1827), and one from Bram Stoker’s classic The Jewel of Seven Stars.

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