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A Land Beyond Even Faerie: The Back of the Beyond by James Stoddard

A Land Beyond Even Faerie: The Back of the Beyond by James Stoddard

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Cover by Bryan Burke and Scott Faris

This review is jointly composed by Gabe Dybing and Nick Ozment

Back in 1998 there appeared a book that we bought more than once. We were so excited about it that we were prepared to force it as a gift on anyone who expressed the remotest interest in reading it. The book was The High House, by James Stoddard. It was the most numinous novel we had read since… well, since encountering J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, which was when we were much younger.

What we should clarify is that, chronologically, in terms of years of publication, Stoddard’s The High House was our most notable find composed after the works of those two most esteemed Inklings. We had been publishing Mooreeffoc Magazine: Fiction in the Mythic Tradition, and, while doing so, we were specifying the kind of material we wanted to publish. We ended up using as models works gathered around or before Tolkien’s most notable publications, and many of those productions were printed or reprinted within Lin Carter’s Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series.

And it was precisely this series — or favorite works from this line — that Stoddard channeled into his late-century creation. In short, The High House (and its sequels, The False House and Evenmere) reference (often in a form that today we call “Easter eggs”) those foundational fantasies, while simultaneously synthesizing them into its own original expression deserving of a place on the shelf right in among the beloved volumes it celebrates.

We say the same now for Stoddard’s latest original work (this one not precisely related to The High House “universe”) The Back of the Beyond. The “call outs” to the classic works of mythopoeic literature, in this one, aren’t as pronounced as they are in The High House (though we believe we detected a few). If The High House and its successors might be described as a tribute to or celebration of the masters that came before it (while crafting its own personality and its own expression), The Back of the Beyond sees all of its antecedents dissolved into a fine and rich loam out of which (Tolkien once described the creative process as producing out of “the leaf-mould of the mind”) Stoddard’s current expression rises in full bloom. Stoddard here produces a unique and arresting vision, (hopefully) the beginning of a new fantasy series in conversation with the greats, this time as a full-grown peer, whereas, within the composition of The High House, Stoddard might have been more of a student.

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An Entire World in HD: Crescent City, Book 1: House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas

An Entire World in HD: Crescent City, Book 1: House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas

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Cover by Carlos Quevado

Bryce Quinlan is half fae, with just enough fae blood to make her ears come to a point and her nails hard as daggers. She also has an intense sense of smell. Besides these small physical attributions, she’s lacking any sense of the power that courses through full blooded fae. She navigates society as a half-breed, not belonging to either human or fae society fully; an outcast in many ways. To cope, Bryce parties. Her small but close-knit group of friends join the hazy, drug- and dance-fueled nights. Until every one of them is suddenly, abruptly, murdered by a demon that hasn’t seen the light of day for a millennium.

Hunt Athalar is a fallen angel, enslaved to the Archangels he once tried to overthrow. Hunt is known as the Angel of Death, the Umbra Mortis, due to his immense strength and the literal lightening coursing through his veins. He is the deadliest assassin in Crescent City.

After the attack that kills Bryce’s friends, she and Hunt are paired together by the Archangel Micah himself to piece together what happened that night, and discover who unleashed such a dangerous creature. As Bryce and Hunt dig deeper into the case, they uncover a dark plot that runs much deeper than they once thought. A force powerful enough to end life as they know it brews beneath the surface, and they have to figure out how to stop it.

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A Fascinating, Ordinary 1950s SF Novel: Robert Silverberg’s Collision Course

A Fascinating, Ordinary 1950s SF Novel: Robert Silverberg’s Collision Course

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Collision Course by Robert Silverberg. First Edition: Avalon Books, 1961.
Jacket design by Ed Emshwiller (click to enlarge)

Collision Course
by Robert Silverberg
Avalon Books (224 pages, $2.95 in hardcover, 1961)

Robert Silverberg needs no introduction to readers of Black Gate, I should think — author, over six or seven decades, of dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories, editor of rows of reprint and original anthologies, winner of four Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards, and numerous career awards including induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, an SFWA Grand Master, and the First Fandom Hall of Fame — yet it’s easy to come across unfamiliar titles from along the twists and turns of his long and varied career. He began in the 1950s, a prolific author of short stories and of standard genre SF novels that he was able to write and sell quickly, and while some of them have been reprinted several times in decades since, this early body of work has been eclipse by the high quality work of the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, for which he won many of those awards, and by later popular works such as his Majipoor novels and stories.

The novel at hand is one of those earlier works, and it’s interesting precisely because it’s not a major work of science fiction in any way.

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The Doom of “Oden”: Twilight of the Gods (Grimnir #2)

The Doom of “Oden”: Twilight of the Gods (Grimnir #2)

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With Grimnir #2 Twilight of the Gods (TotG), Scott Oden presents a novel take on Ragnarök, the apocalypse in Norse mythology. He masterfully integrates his historical fiction expertise (i.e., from Memnon, Men of Bronze) with gritty battles reminiscent of Robert E. Howard (i.e., the creator of Conan the Barbarian; Oden recently published a serialized, pastiche novella across the Savage Sword of Conan Marvel Comic series). Few can merge the intensity of low-fantasy Sword & Sorcery with high-fantasy Epics, but Oden does here.

TotG is second in this series; Fletcher Vredenburgh reviewed Griminr #1 A Gathering of Ravens (AGoR) in 2017, and reported: “Oden tells a story that feels lifted straight from the sagas and Eddas.” This February, John O’Neill posted a Future Treasures to reveal the Jimmy Iacobelli cover art to Twilight of the Gods.

This article is a review of the story, the style, and the lore. Read on to learn about the series’ namesake, the apocalypse in this second volume, and get teasers for the third book, The Doom of Odin.

“Mark this, little bird: you can judge how high you stand in your enemy’s esteem by the weapon he draws against you.” – Grimnir

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Lovecraft in China: The Flock of Ba-Hui by Oobmab

Lovecraft in China: The Flock of Ba-Hui by Oobmab

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Cover by Roger Betka

The Flock of Ba-Hui and Other Stories
Oobmab (translated by Arthur Meursault and Akira)
Camphor Press (254 pages, $24.99 hardcover/$14.99 paperback/$6.99 digital, February 2020)

Beyond the protective barrier of Europe’s vast libraries, Latinate languages, aristocratic bloodlines, and imperial armies, there lurks a malign chaos of ancient knowledge and alien science. To our Western eyes, this chaos is a universe of black magic and monsters but there is, alas, much more to it than that, when one considers the full span of inhuman evil that extends from ancient creatures long outcast, brooding and breeding sinister vengeance in the Earth’s depths, to the latest incursions by loathsome entities whose blasphemous technologies have carried them to this green and innocent planet from the mist-shrouded globes circling the farthest stars.

This is essentially Lovecraft country: a universe that has become known as the “Cthulhu Mythos.” Ever-fearful of dark forces from the outside, in daily life the American author H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an enthusiastic exponent of modernity – the expansion of northern European cultures throughout the world to the disadvantage, even appropriation, even erasure, of indigenous and non-European cultures. As America itself blossomed into an imperial power, Lovecraft’s United Empire loyalism (which to be fair, was greatly mitigated in his later years) envisioned a USA that “must ever remain an integral and important part [as he wrote at age 24] of the great universal empire of British thought and literature.”

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft treasured his native New England not only for its green fields, stone churches, and stately mansions, but for the ways these things embodied the culture of an even-more-native England, a just and civilized seat of a white, English-speaking empire, an island across the sea that he felt linked to in spirit, although he never saw it in person.

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Stories That Work: Short Story Collections

Stories That Work: Short Story Collections

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The Martian Chronicles-small Men-Martians-and-Machines-small The Green Hills of Earth-small

Normally I look at a couple short stories that have caught my eye since my last article, and then dive into them for a closer look. But in these stay-at-home times I realized how important short stories are in my reading life, and how short story collections are often my favorite pastime.

Like many of you, I became a recreational reader early on. My school desk always had science fiction tucked inside that I would sneak peeks at every chance I could. Some teachers just let me read. They must have decided that a book kept me still and quiet. It’s illuminating to consider my introductions to Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Madeleine L’Engle happened during math or social studies lessons at East Elementary.

As much as I loved books, though, the idea of writing stories didn’t come to me until I read Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. There was no way I could write a book! A two-page essay on Abraham Lincoln took an entire weekend (and I didn’t choose the topic), but those short stories that Bradbury wrote, the ones that made me cry and laugh and tied my heart with emotions I didn’t even knew existed, might just be possible to finish. Heck, “Rocket Summer” was only 228 words long. I could write a story that short.

More than that, Bradbury turned me onto enjoying short stories. From The Martian Chronicles, I went to The Illustrated Man, R is for Rocket, S is for Space,  and I Sing the Body Electric. I’m glad I didn’t discover The Small Assassin at that time. The trajectory of my writing career might have careened differently.

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The Ground Rules Have Been Put in Place: Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery, by Brian Murphy

The Ground Rules Have Been Put in Place: Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery, by Brian Murphy

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Flame and Crimson-small Flame and Crimson-back-small

Cover by Tom Barber

Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery
By Brian Murphy
Pulp Hero Press (282 pages, $19.95 in trade paperback/$7.99 digital, January 16, 2020)

At long last, we have a history of the sword-and-sorcery genre, and a very welcome and erudite study it is. Brian Murphy is to be commended for his honest appreciation of our frequently dismissed and often mocked genre. He intelligently surveys the expanse of the sword-and-sorcery field warts and all, low points and high, putting the genre into its proper literary perspective.

To present a linear history of the sword-and-sorcery genre is in fact to dissect an Yggdrasil of many branches, which is precisely what Murphy has done here. His challenge in undertaking Flame and Crimson was great—confronting a century of work and reducing discussion of it to the reasonable length of about 250 pages. He has risen to the challenge.

(Full disclosure: I am mentioned a few times in Flame and Crimson and am cited in a pull-quote in the header to chapter 1. I am also published by Pulp Hero Press, the imprint that has brought out Flame and Crimson.)

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Stories the Dogs Tell: Clifford D. Simak’s City

Stories the Dogs Tell: Clifford D. Simak’s City

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City by Clifford D. Simak. First Edition: Gnome Books, 1952.
Cover by Frank Kelly Freas (click to enlarge)

City
by Clifford D. Simak
Gnome Press (224 pages, $2.75 in hardcover, May 1952)

Clifford D. Simak was a Midwestern US newspaperman who wrote science fiction on the side, and published stories beginning in the 1930s in magazines like Wonder Stories until finding a home in John W. Campbell’s Astounding in the 1940s (and later Galaxy in the 1950s). City was his earliest significant work, published in 1952 but composed of stories published mostly in Astounding from 1944 onward. An enduring work, it won one of the very earliest awards for SF or fantasy, the International Fantasy Award, in 1953 (two years after Stewart’s Earth Abides, which I reviewed here in January, won the same award). It’s Simak’s most popular book along with his Way Station, published a decade later.

Gist

The book tells the future of humanity as it abandons cities for country estates and then moves off Earth to settle other planets, and in parallel the rise of an artificially created Dog civilization. By the end, humans have largely propagated outward to other planets, and Earth is left to the intelligent dog civilization, to whom these stories are myths.

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“Authenticity” in Sword & Sorcery Fiction

“Authenticity” in Sword & Sorcery Fiction

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Gabe S&S-small

Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

These days, in intersection with my Conan gaming (I enjoy both Monolith’s board game and Modiphius’s roleplaying game), I have been reading a lot of two things: weird fiction from the turn of last century into, maybe, the 1940s; and sword & sorcery — anything that, on its cover, features a muscled male wielding medieval weaponry — predominantly from the ‘70s or ‘80s. (This latter does the double duty of encouraging me to work out.)

As is to be expected, these works offer various levels of quality. Early-last-century weird fiction is in a class of its own, and, though writers of that era freely borrowed tropes, themes and elements from each other (they very much appear to have been in conversation, literally or otherwise), the form of the weird tale is not as calcified as that of sword & sorcery appears to be by the ‘80s. Even within this latter’s straitjacket, however, I have encountered some standouts, including John Dalmas’s The Orc Wars (beginning with The Yngling, 1971), Gordon Dickson’s and Roland Green’s Jamie the Red (an unofficial Thieves’ World novel, 1984), and John Maddox Robert’s The King of the Wood (1983). Why I like these is for the reasons that one would like any work of fiction, of course, but with one addition: they present a sense of verisimilitude. I should add here, for anyone who might not be privy to how sword & sorcery is supposed to be subdivided from its parent genre of fantasy, that sword & sorcery is supposed to be more “realistic.” The world presented in such tales is premodern. Life is hard. The cultures do not have our present technology (nor magic — magic, in this subgenre, if not “low,” is rare and mysterious and terrifying and usually very, very “wrong”) with which to ease the drudgery of existence. In other words, the characters in such stories live in the way that folks in the Middle Ages lived, possibly in the way that many of our grandparents or great-grandparents lived, if they were homesteading somewhere.

This is why I no longer write sword & sorcery. I am a city boy. I am modern. I have no idea what “real life” is like. And yet I somehow have enough of one to know — intuitively or otherwise — when a writer knows even less than I do. To catalog the many errors of some of our most famous current fantasy writers is outside of the scope of these observations, but I’ll point to the occasion that spurred me finally to write on this topic here.

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Magic and Mayhem in 1905 New York City: The Glass Magician by Caroline Stevermer

Magic and Mayhem in 1905 New York City: The Glass Magician by Caroline Stevermer

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The Glass Magician CoverBound to a chair, twenty-year-old stage magician Thalia Cutler must escape before the sword hanging above her head plunges down and kills her. She only has a short time – a candle burns through the rope keeping the sword aloft.

The sword is real. The flame is real. The manacles are real.

The trick is called the Siege Perilous. Luckily, the audience can’t see what she’s doing behind the curtain. Thalia pulls out the manacles’ key, which was hidden in her voluminous medieval-style sleeves. It’s a simple matter to unlock the cuffs. Or at least, it should be. The key jams in the left manacle. It won’t release.

She yanks her arm against the restraints, but it no use. She’s caught on this chair, unable to escape. She’s going to die. She knows it. Her body goes numb; her limbs prick with pins and needles.

Just as the rope begins to give way, her arm changes into something else. It’s white; it has feathers… Where her human hand should be, she now has the tip of a wing. It easily slips out of the manacle.

Vaulting out of the chair, she barely makes it through the trapdoor before the sword lands, quivering, on the seat.

Thalia might have just escaped the Siege Perilous, but now she’s in more danger than ever. She had always thought she was nothing more than a Solitaire, a nonmagical human. But her narrow escape from the Siege Perilous reveals she’s really a Trader who can shapeshift into an animal – in her case, some animal with white wings. As a new Trader who can’t control her wild magic, Thalia is a magnet for monsters. Manticores attack, trying to siphon off her power and leave her a soulless shell, soon to perish. Worse yet, by attracting manticores, she endangers everyone around her.

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