Black Gate

Read Part I of this series, Don Wollheim, Edwin L. Arnold, and Otis Adelbert Kline.

The most controversial of the second generation of Sword & Planet authors was certainly John Norman, which is the pseudonym for author John Lange, a philosophy professor. The first book, Tarnsman of Gor, was published in 1966 and then generally one a year until a break after 1988. There are a total of 37 books at last count but I’ve only personally read up to #23 and don’t own the rest.

From this series, I first read book 2, Outlaw of Gor, which has the main character, Tarl Cabot, enslaved. He must lead a revolt to free himself and other prisoners. Strangely enough, given the later reputation of this series, I found this book in my small town library in Arkansas, in the Bible Belt. That should tell you that the early books in this series were pretty standard fantasy. I found the book quite well written and enjoyable, and began to seek out more. (It was quite a few years until I was able to mail order a copy of Book 1.)

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Swordsmen in the Sky (Ace, 1964). Cover by Frank Frazetta

Swordsmen in the Sky, edited by Donald Wollheim

If our genre has a holy grail to find, this would be it. I read this collection as a kid. Found it in our local library. And loved every single story in there. Took me a while to find a copy as an adult but it’s one of my pride and joys.

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Flashing Swords! #2, 4, & 5 (Science Fiction Book Club, September 1973, May 1977,
and December 1981). Covers by Frank Frazetta, Gary Viskupic, and Ron Miller

It’s time to take a look at another Sword & Sorcery anthology series I really love: Flashing Swords, edited by Lin Carter. It is second in my affections only to the Swords Against Darkness 5-book series edited by Andy Offutt that I wrote about here last year.

Flashing Swords! came out of the group known as SAGA, which stood for the Swordsmen and Sorcerers Guild of America, a group in the 1970s and 80s that included almost all the elite S&S writers of the age.

They were an informal group but Lin Carter was the closest thing they had to a leader. Under his editorship, five outstanding anthologies of works from their members appeared, all new stories, not reprints. As shown in the pictures below, I have the volumes from Dell paperbacks, as they were originally released, and three from Nelson Doubleday in hardback (above), as they were offered by the Science Fiction Book Club.

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Of Men and Monsters, by William Tenn
(Ballantine Books, December 1975). Cover by Boris Vallejo

After posting about The Borrowers by British author Mary Norton (1903 -1992) last week, several people mentioned other books and movies with similar kinds of themes — little people living in the houses of big people. I thought I might take another post to discuss a few other examples from my own book collection.

First up is series by American author John Peterson (1924 – 2002). The first one was just called The Littles and was published in 1967, 15 years after The Borrowers (1952). The Littles live much like the “borrowers. They look human except for having tails. (In films they apparently look very mouselike but that’s not the case in the books.)

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The Borrowers and The Borrowers Afield, by Mary Norton
(Odyssey/Harcourt, January 1998). Covers by Marla Frazee

I’ve done four posts in a row on Edgar Rice Burroughs, with more to come. But right now it’s time for a change of pace.

It’s going to be a big change for this particular post. It’s about The Borrowers. In my late teens, after I learned Andre Norton was a woman, someone told me she’d written books under her own name of Mary Norton, and that one was called The Borrowers. Turns out this wasn’t true; her original name was Alice Mary Norton, although she changed it legally to Andre Alice Norton in 1934. This was in the late 1970s, pre-internet, and I believed Andre Norton wrote The Borrowers for several years. It added to her charm for a while because I’d read The Borrowers when I was 11 or 12 and adored it.

The Borrowers may seem pretty far afield from Sword & Planet fiction, but the story of little people living in human houses and borrowing things from them, which would explain why things got “lost,” inspired my imagination and I invented many stories of myself shrunk down to that size and adventuring. After I wrote Swords of Talera, my first S&P novel, I toyed with the idea of writing an S&P story with borrower size characters but never did. Many many years later I discovered a graphic novel from DC called Sword of the Atom, which somewhat scratched that itch for me. (More on that later.)

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