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New Treasures: Against the Slave Lords

New Treasures: Against the Slave Lords

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Against the Slave LordsI think the release of Against the Slave Lords is cause for celebration.

Against the Slave Lords is a hardcover collection of four interconnected Advanced Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules, the A1 – A4 series Scourge of the Slave Lords, originally published in 1980 and 1981. It includes new forewords by the four surviving designers. Lawrence Schick, for example, relates how his inspiration came from fellow author and dungeon master Harold Johnson:

In his campaign one night, Harold had our characters get captured, whereupon he took away all our stuff and threw us in a dungeon. The challenge: escape without relying on all our carefully hoarded adventuring gear. Were our characters people with skills and brains, or were they really just lists of equipment?

It also includes the maps and all of the original black-and-white interior art. Most intriguing of all, there’s also a brand new fifth adventure that sets the stage for the entire series, published here for the first time. Danger at Darkshelf Quarry is designed for low-level players (levels 1-3).

Why celebrate? It signals that publishers Wizards of the Coast are serious about bringing the canonical works of first edition D&D back into print. I was plenty excited at their last premium hardcover reprint, Dungeons of Dread, as it collected some of the most famous adventures written by AD&D‘s creator, Gary Gygax — including Tomb of Horrors and The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (still one of my favorite adventure modules of all time) — all of which were long out of print and hard to find.

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Magic Realm Lives Again

Magic Realm Lives Again

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DIGITAL CAMERAMagic Realm, designed by Richard Hamblen and released by Avalon Hill in 1979, is adventure fantasy role-playing wrapped up in a board game. No surprise, given the time. It has a complexity rating of 9 on Avalon Hill’s 10-point scale, is loaded with chits, and has a rule book approaching 100 pages of two-column small print.

In modern parlance, Magic Realm has crunch. And all that crunchy goodness is now available for free on your computer.

Before we examine the computer version, let’s have a look at the basics of play. There are sixteen characters for players to choose from in Magic Realm. Most of the usual tropes are covered: White Knight, Black Knight, Amazon, Wizard, Elf, Dwarf, etc.

Players choose their own victory conditions, setting goals of Gold, Fame, Notoriety, Usable Spells, and Great Treasures. They travel roads, caves, hidden paths and secret passages that stretch across the twenty tiles making up the board, and you’re not likely to see the same board configuration twice.

The exploration element is handled well. Goblins and dragons both show up on a tiles with caves, but until you get to a tile and hear a howl or roar, see the ruins or smell the smoke, you don’t know if goblins, dragons, neither, or both live there.

And knowing is critical. The White Knight can probably take a dragon, but a group of goblins will overwhelm him. The Amazon, on the other hand, can’t scratch a dragon with her starting equipment, but she can usually work her way through a half-dozen of the weakest goblins. (The Elf doesn’t care either way, as he can run away from both.)

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Fantasy Out Loud III: Suffer the Children?

Fantasy Out Loud III: Suffer the Children?

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the-mysterious-benedict-society-0316003956-l_5462In the original 2011 edition of Fantasy Out Loud, I took a stab at reviewing the fantasy books I had read aloud to my children. Back in those halcyon days, The Hobbit was front and center.

Some eighteen months later, my boys are older and taller, but not necessarily wiser. Much to my chagrin, older son Corey, aged thirteen as of this writing, no longer wants me to read aloud to him prior to bedtime. On his own, he’s lately polished off all four of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books, and is now slamming through Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, which he describes as “weird.” (We’ll see what he says when he gets to the end, one of the best reveals in written English.)

But, because Corey is tackling these titles on his lonesome ownsome, this column is necessarily dedicated to eight-year-old Evan, who still can’t get enough of pre-bed daddy readings.

In the last year, fantasy titles we’ve tackled include The Warriors: Into the Wild, The Mysterious Benedict Society, Black Beauty, Summerland, Tuck Everlasting, and Magic By the Lake.

Well, all right: Black Beauty isn’t strictly fantasy, since author Anna Sewell never allows Beauty to actually speak, but for a horse to be so observant, so proscriptive, so downright brilliant?  Sounds like fantasy to me.

Here’s the rub: Evan did not like these books equally. Nor do his growing sense of taste and literary discretion always parallel, sadly, my own. At least two of the books above were volumes I would have preferred to hurl across the room, but in one case especially, despite my jaundice, Evan was enraptured.

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Sterling E. Lanier and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

Sterling E. Lanier and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

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Hiero-s JourneyTor.com writers Tim Callahan and Mordicai Knode have been reading Gary Gygax’s famous Appendix N, the list of fantasy and SF titles in the back of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. This time Tim Callahan tackles Sterling E. Lanier, author of Hiero’s Journey.

It’s a terrific article, but I note that the editors chose Darrell K. Sweet’s cover for the 1983 Del Rey edition to accompany it, featuring our hero next to his mutant giant moose, chatting amiably with a bear. Dudes. (Or Dames, I dunno.) That’s waaay too sedate a cover for Lanier’s classic. The Vincent di Fate cover for the 1974 Bantam paperback (at right) is the one you want. (Click for a much bigger version, showing that toothy dino in all his glory).

It’s… an incredibly enjoyable book. Lanier may not be even close to as famous as Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, or Roger Zelazny or some of the others from Gygax’s list, but Hiero’s Journey constantly surprised me with its inventiveness and slow built toward a satirical climax. It also moves with a pace appropriate to a story about a guy riding a giant moose and unleashing the occasional psychic fury on mutated howler monkeys and other nefarious creatures….

It’s also a book that seems to have informed one of the weirder seemingly-slapped on aspects of Dungeons & Dragons — I’m speaking about psionics, which seemed out of place in the original AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide — and almost the entirety of the later Gamma World game setting. Gygax isn’t credited with designing Gamma World, but James Ward’s original rulebook for Gamma World cites Hiero’s Journey as an influence, and with that game’s post-nuclear-holocaust setting and mutated animals and cities with names like primitive spellings of our own, it’s like playing scenes straight out of Lanier’s novel…

What Hiero and his companions find, as they explore and escape capture from the new breed of machine-friendly beings who don’t seem to recall what trouble technology hath wrought, is a deep and treacherous dungeon. This part is almost pure D&D adventuring, with roving monsters (mutated beasts) and foul threats from below.

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Vintage Treasures: The Color Out Of Time by Michael Shea

Vintage Treasures: The Color Out Of Time by Michael Shea

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The Color out of TimeI had a hard time deciding whether a book from 1984 qualified as vintage or not.

Then I realized that back in 1984, Ronald Reagan was still in his first term as president. A little checking also showed that the Nr. 1 song in September 1984 was “Missing You” by John Waite and the top film was Ghostbusters.

The final proof that 1984 can be considered vintage is that I was 23 years old back then. So, yeah, I figure that a book from 1984 qualifies as vintage.

So back in 1984, I stumbled across The Color Out of Time at one of our two bookstores in Newark, Ohio. (As added trivia, Newark is the real world counterpart of Gary Braunbeck’s haunted town of Cedar Hill, the fictitious setting for many of his stories). Anyway, this book was especially special back then, as Cthulhu Mythos-themed fiction was scarce. It wasn’t the thriving sub-genre that it is today. So when you found some you grabbed it, paid for it, and then ran like hell to get home and start reading.

Color is one of my favorite Mythos-related books, and it won’t be leaving my collection any time soon. Its rarity on the collectors market shows that those who have it aren’t in any rush to get rid of it. To me, that says a lot about the quality and re-readability of a book.

Michael Shea is one of those rare writers who don’t have a high output, but everything they do produce is of extremely high quality. I’ve been a fan since the 1970s, when I first read A Quest for Simbilis way back in junior high school.

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Vintage Treasures: Tales of Outer Space, edited by Donald A. Wollheim

Vintage Treasures: Tales of Outer Space, edited by Donald A. Wollheim

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Tales of Outer SpaceSometimes I think I owe Donald A. Wollheim for a big chunk of my childhood.

Today we’re looking at Tales of Outer Space, a collection of interplanetary adventure tales edited by Wollheim in 1954, a decade after he invented the mass-market SF anthology with The Pocket Book of Science Fiction in 1943 (the first book with the words “Science Fiction” in the title), and not long after he produced  the first original SF anthology, The Girl With the Hungry Eyes, in 1947.

That’s some pioneering stuff. But Wollheim spent most of his career as a pioneer. From 1947 to 1951, he was the editor of Avon Books, where he introduced mainstream America to mass-market editions of some of the best fantasy from the pulp era — including Ralph Milne Farley’s An Earth Man on Venus (which I discussed last month), A. Merritt’s The Moon Pool, and eighteen issues of the highly sought-after fantasy paperback magazine, The Avon Fantasy Reader, among many other accomplishments. He even published C. S. Lewis’s Silent Planet space trilogy.

In 1952, Wollheim left Avon to spearhead a new paperback imprint, Ace Books, where he remained for 20 years. While there, he added science fiction to their lineup for the first time and, in a stroke of brilliance which endeared him to future generations of paperback collectors, invented the Ace Double in 1952.

You may have heard of some of his other successes at Ace as well: he first introduced Tolkien’s The Lord of Rings to the US in 1964 (against Tolkien’s wishes, as it happened) and published Frank Herbert’s obscure hardcover Dune in a paperback edition that made it a bestseller in 1965.

That ought to be enough for anyone. But of course, as many of you know, it wasn’t enough for Wollheim. In 1971, he left Ace to found his own publishing company, which bore his initials. DAW was the first mass market publisher to specialize in SF and fantasy, and before his death in 1990, it had acquired and published over a thousand titles, making it one of the most successful genre publishers of all time.

Of course, most of that was in Wollheim’s future when he released Tales of Outer Space — but the seeds of greatness were already there for anyone who looked.

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Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang

Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang

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China Mountain ZhangThere’s a distinctive kind of surprise some science fiction books can generate: surprise that a book which seems to be speaking to the beliefs, fears, or world-view of a given time was in fact written well beforehand. I remember being taken aback, for example, that A Clockwork Orange was first published in 1962, before hippies and punks and the coining of ‘generation gap’ (first recorded 1967). And it’s interesting to me that Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, published in 1992, calmly and thoroughly imagines a future dominated by China — something much discussed today, but a less common idea before the turn of the millennium. McHugh’s book is a twentieth century novel, lacking a world wide web or smartphones, that speaks to the twenty-first.

It does so because it’s a very strong book. And because the world it imagines is credible; the setting doesn’t seem a product of the anxiety of an ebbing imperial power, but a depiction of life as it is lived in the future. Characters go about their business, negotiating with the structures of their society as we do ours. We recognise them, and what they do, and their attempts to plan out their lives. As in much of the best science fiction, the imagined society’s complex and deeply imagined, existing in a dynamic relationship with character; it’s realistic, but not mimetic, and uses both its differences and similarities to the world we know as a way of getting at its thematic interest.

The book’s made up of long chapters that have the shape of short stories. Most follow an engineer surnamed Zhang, whose given names are ‘Rafael’ and ‘Zhong Shan,’ the latter of which can be translated ‘China Mountain.’ We follow Zhang as he finds his way to a career and builds a life for himself, a task complicated by ethnicity and sexual orientation. In and around the chapters dealing with Zhang are stories following other characters, minor figures in his life who broaden the story and add depth to the novel’s setting and structure. One of the metaphors that emerges in the book is chaos theory, and the now-familiar image of the butterfly fluttering its wings and causing a hurricane on the far side of the world; so these characters help demonstrate the interconnectedness of the world, affecting each other slightly or significantly, a structural embodiment of the chaos imagery.

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New Treasures: Titan

New Treasures: Titan

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Titan Avalon HillThere are classic fantasy games and there are classic fantasy games. Jai Kamani and David A. Trampier’s Titan, a massive game of conflict between mythological armies of ogres, unicorns, griffons, and other creatures, was perhaps the most ubiquitous fantasy game of my youth. There were copies everywhere, tucked under arms at gaming conventions and on the shelves of department stores.

Titan was first published in an ultra-rare first edition in 1980 by tiny Gorgonstar, Inc. It was later made a hit by Avalon Hill, and remained in print for nearly two decades until Avalon Hill was sold and ceased operations in 1998. After that, copies of the most popular fantasy board game of the 80s and 90s gradually became harder and harder to find.

I remember getting my boys excited about Titan by nostalgically telling tales of epic battles between behemoths, dragons, and trolls. They clamored to play it.

I’d never owned Titan, but that’s not a problem in the age of the Internet. I found a pristine copy on eBay and hung on during a spirited bidding war. 90 bucks later, it was on my kitchen table.

Still in the shrink wrap.

It was perfectly preserved. My boys stood at my side, ready to go, anxious to throw down some dice, and experience some of that legendary Titan action. To shred the shrink and punch out counter sheets that had staunchly stood fast for over twenty years. My hands gripped the game, hesitating.

I couldn’t do it.

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Vintage Treasures: The Best of Murray Leinster

Vintage Treasures: The Best of Murray Leinster

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The Best of Murray LeinsterI first encountered Murray Leinster… wow, I don’t even know when. Probably in The Hugo Winners, Isaac Asimov’s 1962 anthology collecting the first short stories to win science fiction’s coveted prize.

It featured Leinster’s 1956 novelette, “Exploration Team,” about a desperate rescue attempt on a distant planet — involving an illegal settler blackmailed into helping a lost colony, and his team of Kodiak bears. Lost colonies, deadly aliens, and even more deadly bears… that’s the kind of story that sticks in your mind when you’re twelve, believe me.

Leinster died in 1975; he published his last book, a novelization of the Land of the Giants TV series, in 1969. But he was a steady presence on bookstore shelves during my formative reading years for well over a decade after his death, with reprint titles like The Med Series (Ace, 1983) and The Forgotten Planet (Carroll & Graf, 1990).

The mass market reprints have tapered off over the last few years. The last were all from Baen, a trio of excellent collections all edited by Eric Flint and Guy Gordon: Med Ship (2002), Planets of Adventure (2003), and A Logic Named Joe (2005).

Since then, the wheels of publishing have ground on, as they do, abandoning Leinster by the side of the road. We did our part to keep his memory alive, of course. I reprinted one of Leinster’s earliest pulp tales, “The Fifth-Dimension Catapult,” from the January 1931 Astounding Stories of Super-Science, in Black Gate 9.

There have also been low-budget digital editions of his out-of-copyright pulp fiction, sure, but by and large the genre — as living genres should — has focused instead on new and emerging authors.

I used to think that was inevitable. Readers have long memories, but publishing industries don’t, and when an author has been out of print for over a decade, she’s likely to remain that way.

But the brilliant Lester del Rey, publisher of Del Rey Books, proved me wrong. In fact, he proved me wrong nearly four decades ago, with a fabulous line of top-selling paperbacks collecting the best short science fiction and fantasy from the writers of the Golden Age of SF — including The Best of Murray Leinster, a collection of some of the best short SF and fantasy of the 20th Century.

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Kirkus Looks at Galaxy Science Fiction

Kirkus Looks at Galaxy Science Fiction

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Galaxy February 1951Over the last few months, Matthew Wuertz and Rich Horton have been tag-teaming a series of Retro Reviews here at Black Gate, looking at science fiction digests from the 1950s and 60s — especially H.L. Gold’s Galaxy, which Matthew has been covering issue by issue since the very first, cover-dated October 1950.

Meanwhile, Andrew Liptak at Kirkus Reviews has done his own retrospective, “Changing the Playing Field: H.L. Gold & Galaxy Science Fiction,” a detailed and affectionate look at Gold and the superb magazine he created:

Galaxy appeared in October 1950 as a monthly publication. It paid far better than its competitors, and Gold proved to be a far better editor than his counterpart at Astounding… With Gold at the helm, Galaxy Science Fiction began to change the tone of the genre. Astounding had taken advantage of the scientific rush that followed the development of the atomic bomb, and the resulting doomsday stories that followed. Gold went in another direction, explaining in an editorial that “The shape humanity is in is cause for worry, I believe, but not the kind of paralyzing terror that clutches science fiction writers in particular… Look, fellers, the end isn’t here yet.”

Strong, socially aware and satirical fiction became the mainstay with Galaxy, and 1951 proved to be an excellent year for the publication: “The Fireman,” by Ray Bradbury, appeared in the February issue, set in a dystopian world where literature was burned by government agents, and was later expanded into his landmark novel Fahrenheit 451. April brought Cyril Kornsbluth’s story “The Marching Morons,” and September saw Gold bring Robert Heinlein away from Astounding with his three-part story The Puppet Masters…

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