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The Spider Revival Part 2: City of Doom

The Spider Revival Part 2: City of Doom

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Spider-CityOfDoomLast week, I reviewed the first volume in Baen’s trade paperback reprints of the adventures of Norvell Page’s grisly pulp hero, The Spider. Now, I plunge into the violent maelstrom of … The Spider: City of Doom!

The three novels reprinted in this volume are The City Destroyer, The Faceless One, and The Council of Evil. The City Destroyer, which Page submitted under the title Crumbling Doom, is the earliest of Baen’s reprinted Spider stories, published originally in the January 1935 issue of The Spider. It also appeared in Pocket Books’ reformatted (with pointless modernizing) series in the ‘70s. It ranks as one of the Norvell Page’s best-written works, but it has an ugly timeliness that dulls the edge of the absurdist fantasy and may unsettle some readers. In the opening chapter the villain, decked out with the bland handle “The Master,” steals the secret for a metal-corroding dust. Richard Wentworth thinks the Master plans to use the chemical invention to break into bank vaults, but he should know that his adversaries don’t think that small. Instead of wasting time with piddling safes, the Master uses the chemical to knock down entire New York skyscrapers, killing thousands of people. His first target is New York’s newest, tallest building, and the writing dwells for a few pages on a gruesome depiction of the skyscraper’s collapse and the gory aftermath, complete with fleeing crowds, a dust cloud pluming over the Manhattan skyline, and trapped people trying to escape certain death in a crumbling tower.

Uhm … not a pleasant memory. At times, our world and that of the pulps share tragic similarities. Amidst the Great Depression and staring toward an oncoming second world war, pulp authors occasionally tapped into an insecurity not far removed from our own. The City Destroyer delivers more fear and tension than any thriller you’ll find on the recent bestseller lists, but new readers should be prepared for moments of queasy familiarity. It isn’t much of a nostalgia trip, and even the Spider’s heroics can’t halt an obscene death toll. I would conservatively estimate that seven thousand people perish during this story.

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Forgive Me, Steven, For I Have Sinned . . .

Forgive Me, Steven, For I Have Sinned . . .

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“Man, you have got to read this book!”  The words came in a breathless rush, from a friend whose opinion I trusted.  “It’s better than Gates of Fire!” he said, thrusting a rather thick volume into my hands.

Now, most everyone who knows me understands that I have two literary idols, one dead and one living: Robert E. Howard and Steven Pressfield.  They are the prophets of my personal pantheon; their words, their stories, have no equal.  Thus, for him to come up to me and say he’d found a book better than Pressfield’s Gates of Fire was pure heresy, like taking a tinkle on the Bible.  “Impossible!” I replied, holding the book away from my body as though its touch was enough to cause spiritual pollution.

“Read it! You’ll see!”

Color me skeptical . . . and more than a little eager to prove my friend wrong. I accepted his challenge and dug into it that very afternoon, expecting I’d call him up in an hour or so and curse him for taking Pressfield’s name in vain. But I couldn’t. That book had sucked me in.

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Sword Against Slug: Robert E. Howard’s Almuric

Sword Against Slug: Robert E. Howard’s Almuric

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In the old days, when sheep were sheep and ewes were embraceable, genres tended to ossify pretty fast. But no genre-formula became so formulaic so fast as sword-and-planet. Burroughs set the pattern with A Princess of Mars: a lone American (not a Canadian–not a Ugandan–not a Lithuanian–an American) is mysteriously plunged into an exotic other world which is both more advanced and more primitive than the earth he knows. He conquers all by virtue of his heroism and marries the space princess. In the inevitable sequel the pitiless author will somehow compel him do it all again, sometimes under another name. This sounds like mere mockery, and of all subgenres sword-and-planet may be the most mockable (one has but to mention the magic syllable “Gor” to banish all useful thought), but when well-done it can be a blast. Burroughs’ Barsoom books are still being read, are still being filmed and name-checked in other media, and not because of his melodious prose style or his thoughts on the eternal verities; somehow the pattern he hit on (and partly appropriated) rang people’s bell, and continues to ring it. Figuring out why wouldn’t be a waste of anyone’s time, even if the books are not a matter of high seriousness.

In this genre or subgenre, Almuric is of special interest, because it is by one of the greatest fantasists of the pulp era, Robert E. Howard. It’s also interesting as one of REH’s few booklength works and, it seems, his only experiment at building an entire secondary world. Although the story (like much of REH’s work) is now in the public domain and available online, I read the novel in Planet Stories’ new edition and I recommend that anyone really interested in the book do the same. I say this not because the publisher has paid me an enormous illicit bribe (although I will accept one if offered). The online texts are mostly poor transcriptions littered with many obvious proofreading slips (e.g. “forward” and “foreward” for “foreword”; “premediatated” for “premeditated”, etc.–and that’s on the first two screens of this one). In contrast, Planet’s text is clean and readable; there’s an interesting introduction by Joe Lansdale and a great cover in the Jeff Jones tradition by Andrew Hou.

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The Spider Revival, Part 1: Robot Titans of Gotham

The Spider Revival, Part 1: Robot Titans of Gotham

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spider-robot-titans-of-gothamIf you have never met the most notorious of all pulp magazine heroes — The Spider, Master of Men! — then Baen Books has a deal for you. After a long absence from mass market paperbacks, the Spider returns in two Baen collections The Spider: Robot Titans of Gotham and The Spider: City of Doom. The two volumes pack together five of Norvell Page’s best Spider novels, plus a bonus yarn from his madcap typewriter.

(Update: Now there’s a third volume, The Spider vs. The Empire State.)

If you’ve previously met the Spider, you might have read some of these adventures from reprints in the Carroll & Graf series. Buy these new books anyway; I want Baen to feed us more.

As for you newcomers, I feel obliged to give you fair warning about the Spider. Otherwise you might wonder after reading one of these stories, “Was Norvell Page completely insane?” No, he was a professional pulp writer. Which may come down to the same thing, when you consider the deadlines. But even for the crazy world of the cheap paper story magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, the zenith years of this lost world of fiction, Page’s tales of the Spider are so overloaded with outrageous violence and fear, and so under-stocked with logic and elementary structuring, that it seems the author wrote them after shooting more heroin than Popeye Doyle confiscated in The French Connection.

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Short Fiction Reviews #12

Short Fiction Reviews #12

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del-rey-book2
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy
Tall Tales on the Iron Horse
Reviewed by David Soyka

Well, here we are again with another short fiction collection with a dumb and unoriginal title –
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy is the latest entrant in a long line of insipidly titled collections that have contributed their small part towards the ghettoization of the genre.  Presumably this is not editor Ellen Datlow’s fault, but rather that of some marketing department genius. You might think that a publishing house with a pedigree like Del Rey Books could actually use some imagination when titling works of the imagination.

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Pastiches ‘R’ Us: Conan the Raider

Pastiches ‘R’ Us: Conan the Raider

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Conan the Raider

By Leonard Carpenter (Tor, 1986)

So here I am on the Black Gate blog, your “Tuesdays with Ryan.” I’m already a blog addict, and I’ve run my own extensive blog for two years (after two years of running a sloppy, more personal-blathering journal at a dreadful blog service). I write science-fiction and fantasy, mostly aimed at teenagers (I am an adamant supporter of YA genre literature, and for various reasons I may talk about in another entry, it is the genre niche where I feel the most at home), but I’m also an extensive nonfiction author fascinated with the history of speculative fiction and the stranger corners of it that don’t often come to light. And, in case anyone cares, I am a damned good lindy hoppin’ swing dancer with a love of period clothing.

Now, how to begin blogging at Black Gate? The answer arrived easily. I’ve chosen to return to my “origins” as an online reviewer, and review a Conan pastiche novel. Ambition!

I have a long association with the “Conan pastiche,” here defined as any story about the legendary sword-and-sorcery hero coming from a writer other than Conan’s creator, Robert E. Howard. When I first started reading Howard’s Conan stories in the early ‘90s, the only place I could easily locate them was in the paperback series that mixed pastiche stories among Howard’s originals. I was therefore “trained” to accept the pastiches as having as much validity as Conan stories as Howard’s originals, an attitude I now completely reject. But I was young and eager for more of this sword-and-sorcery goodness, so when I finished off the Howard canon, I decided to peek into the other novels from Ballantine and Tor. Most Howard fans would never touch them, but Conan novels were, at the time, one of the few places to buy genuine sword-and-sorcery at a standard chain bookstore.

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A Review of The Book of Joby

A Review of The Book of Joby

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The Book of Joby - cover

By Charlene Brusso

Arthurian legend has had a lasting impact upon western literature and fantasy fiction in particular. Over the last decades an immense number of writers have explored the Arthurian mythos in a variety of different ways. This week, Charlene Brusso examines a recent book that explores a conjunction of Arthurian and Christian stories in a modern setting.

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A Review of Gentleman of the Road

A Review of Gentleman of the Road

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Gentlemen of the Road - cover
By Rich Horton

There’s been much talk in all kinds of circles about Michael Chabon’s appreciative stance on genre fiction. Last year there was even more talk about his most recent novel, Gentlemen of the Road, amongst fans of fantasy, and, more particularly, readers of heroic fiction. The talented Rich Horton decided to take a look for himself, and share his opinion with you.

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A Review of The Whale Road

A Review of The Whale Road

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The Whale Road - cover
By Bill Ward

The Vikings have inspired tales of daring adventure almost from the dawn of historical fiction. H. Rider Haggard’s Eric Brighteyes still makes fine reading today, and one of Edison Marshall’s best novels, The Viking, inspired a film adaption with Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis. Even more famous, and finer, novels followed, like Charles Barnitz’ The Deepest Sea and Frans Gunner Bengtsson’s The Long Ships, the first third of which made it onto technicolor starring Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier. And of course it goes without saying that the Viking sagas themselves make for pretty stirring reading.

This week Bill Ward takes a look at an author whose making his own mark in the genre. The second book in Robert Low’s series just saw print: Bill decided to take a look at the first before he ventured further onto The Whale Road.

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A Game of Ice and Fire

A Game of Ice and Fire

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A Song of Ice And Fire Roleplaying Game

A Review of Green Ronin’s A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying Game
By David Munger

In October, Green Ronin Publishing plans to release a new pen-and-paper fantasy roleplaying product, A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying. Based on George R.R. Martin’s popular epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, it brings the densely populated world of Westeros to life, complete with the knightly combat and courtly intrigue that fans of the books have come to know and love.

Dave Munger recently steered a group of players through the game’s quick-start rules and preview adventure released earlier this year by Green Ronin. Read on to find out all about this unique rule system, and how it played out on a test drive.

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