Journey to Mesharra, Book 3 of the Ro-Lan series by Mike Sirota (Zebra Books, 1980). Artist uncredited
Mike Sirota (1946-) has written quite a lot of books in SF and Fantasy, including some Sword & Planet novels. He’s still writing and is currently working on a comedy/Sci-fi series.
I first encountered Sirota’s work in a book called Berbora, which I’d call Sword & Sorcery rather than S&P. Somewhat later, I found his five book Dannusseries, so named after the main character. They are definitely S&P and are listed below.
Cover for The Pugnacious Peacekeeper and The Wheels of If by Joe Burleson
While the eighteenth volume of the series included C.L. Moore’s Vintage Season and Robert Silverberg’s In Another Country, which takes place at the same time, this volume includes a story and an actual sequel. It also includes the first original story in the series (Silverberg’s story appeared in IASFM nearly a year before appearing in this story). From a production point of view, this is also the first volume that does not have an embossed cover.
The Wheels of If was originally published in Unknown Fantasy Fiction in October, 1940. The story is an alternate history tale that follows Allister Park. Park is a prosecutor in a world which seems to be our own. His current goal is to successfully prosecute the Antonini gang. He sees the successful prosecution as a stepping stone to being nominated for the position of District Attorney for the County of New York. However, when he awoke on Monday, April 11, it was clear that something was different. Park suddenly had a moustache and the New York in which he found himself was not the New York in which he was familiar.
Planet Stories #30: Battle in the Dawn: The Complete Hok the Mighty, by
Manly Wade Wellman (Paizo Publishing, March 2011). Cover by Kieran Yanner
Wellman created his character Hok the Mighty in 1939 and wrote several follow up stories with the character. In 2011, Planet Stories released a “complete” Hok the Mighty collection called Battle in the Dawn, with a cover by Kieran Yanner. The character as Yanner imagined it is shown here and makes me think of Brak the Barbarian.
Despite that image, the stories are not sword & sorcery but what I call “Caveman” fiction. Hok is a Cro-Magnon, an early Homo sapiens. He is wandering north in search of new hunting grounds and comes into contact with the Neanderthals (beast-men) living there. The result is a war between true humans and the sub humans, and Hok leads the way.
Cover for Ill Met in Lankhmar by Sam Rakeland Cover for The Fair at Emain Macha by Mel Grant
This volume of the Tor Double series offers something it hasn’t offered before. Although several of the novellas previously published in the series have played with the tropes of fantasy novels, such as Jack Vance’s The Last Castle or Joanna Russ’s Souls, all of the stories published to this point have been science fiction. With Volume 19, the series offers two novellas which are unabashedly fantasy, Fritz Leiber’s Ill Met in Lankhmar and Charles de Lint’s The Fair in Emain Macha. Not only are both fantasy stories, but both of them are parts of series exploring the characters who feature in them.
Fritz Leiber introduced the world to Lankhmar and his characters of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser in August of 1939 in the story “Two Sought Adventure,” which appeared in Unknown. By 1969, he had published an additional eighteen stories about the adventurers, including one story which told of the Grey Mouser’s life before he met Fafhrd.
Ill Met in Lankhmar was originally published in F&SF in April, 1970. It won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. Ill Met in Lankhmar is the second of four Leiber stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series. A prequel to all of the previously published Lankhmar stories with the exception of “The Unholy Grail,” this novella tells how his two characters meet for the first time. …
Sojarr of Titan (Crestwood Publishing Co, 1949). Cover by Herman Vestal
One of the more unusual items in my Sword & Planet collection is Sojarr of Titan, written by Manly Wade Wellman (1903 – 1986) and published by Crestwood Publishing Company. This is a first edition, I believe, printed in 1949. The story originally appeared in the March 1941 issue of Startling Stories, published by Better Publishing, Inc.
The inside cover of the paperback edition bears a gold tag reading “Ackerman Agency,” with an address. This would be Forest J. Ackerman, of course, though whether Forry actually handled this copy I couldn’t know. There’s also the handwritten list of France, Belgium, Holland, Spain, with a red X across them. Don’t know what that means.
Cover for In Another Country and Vintage Season by Wayne Barlowe
With this volume, the Tor Double series began an experiment and also a format change. Beginning with C.L. Moore’s 1946 story Vintage Season, Tor had Robert Silverberg write a sequel, In Another Country. Depiste the book cover proclaiming it “New!,” the Silverberg piece appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine eleven month prior to its publication in the Tor Double series. In addition, this volume was published in the standard anthology format rather than tête-bêche, perhaps reflecting the two stories’ relationship to each other as original and sequel.
Vintage Season was originally published in Astounding in the September and October 1946 issues and credited to Lawrence O’Donnell. At various times, this story has been credited to C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, Lawrence O’Donnell, or to just C.L. Moore. Tor credits Moore alone for the story.
Warlord of Ghandor by Del DowDell (DAW, August 1977). Cover by Don Maitz
The genre of Sword & Planet fiction means a lot to me. I read it; I write it; I review it. And sometimes I find a book in the genre I don’t much care for. I have to say so when that happens, and give my reasons. But I always stress that this is my opinion, and I can be influenced by my mood going into a book. I also know how hard it is to write a book so I have to give credit to anyone who finishes one and gets it published.
That brings me to Del DowDell. Somewhere in the 1980s I stumbled on a DowDell book called Warlord of Ghandor. The cover, by Don Maitz, suggested a Sword & Planet kind of tale, and it was published by DAW, which published the Prescotbooks I loved.
As I mentioned last week, in January of 1990, Tor began published a second series of Tor Doubles: The Tor Double Action Western series. Running for twenty months, the books in this series were anonymously edited and packaged by Martin H. Greenberg and Bill Pronzini through Tekno Books. Not only did they differ from the science fiction series in subject matter, but also in format.
While most of the Tor SF Doubles were published as dos-a-dos format, where the book needed to be flipped over to read the second story, this series was all published in a standard format, with the second story following the first. As it happens, a month after this series was introduced, the Tor SF Double was published in the same traditional format.
The Westerns also differed because while the SF volumes mostly included stories by different authors (with three exceptions), each of the Tor Double Action Westerns featured two stories by the same authors, essentially making each volume a two story collection.
Over the course of the twenty volumes, twelve authors were represented, with Henry Wilson Allen appearing under two pseudonyms: Clay Fisher and Will Henry, Lewis B. Patten having two volumes showcasing his work, Zane Grey stories appearing in three volumes, and Max Brand showing up in a full quarter of the books published, including the first and last volumes. Also, while most of the authors who were published in the science fiction series were alive at the time their works were printed, only three of the Western authors were alive: Allen, Steve Frazee, and Wayne D. Overholser.
The last five volumes in the series were rebranded as the Tor Double Western series.
Planet Stories #29: Sojan the Swordsman by Michael Moorcock/ Under the Warrior Star
by Joe R. Landsale (Paizo Publishing, October 5, 2010). Cover by Kieran Yanner
When I saw this book, I immediately had to have it. A “Planet Stories Double Feature!” Planet Stories published quite a bit of Sword & Planet fiction back in the day, and of all the pulps, if I could have had a subscription to just one it probably would have been that one.
This “Planet Stories,” however, is a modern effort from Paizo Publishing that started out reprinting old tales from the original magazine, including some great stuff by Leigh Brackett.
This particular work contains two novellas, “Sojan the Swordsman” from Michael Moorcock, and “Under the Warrior Star” by Joe Lansdale. “Sojan” reprints a bunch of old Sojan tales from Michael Moorcock, which were linked together to make something of a longer tale. It was printed first in the collection, probably because he’s the better known of the two authors, but I think they should have done the Lansdale piece first. It’s considerably better.
Cover for Divide and Rule by N. Taylor Blanchard Cover for The Sword of Rhiannon by A.C. Farley
The seventeenth Tor Double, includes two stories, L. Sprague de Camp’s Divide and Rule and Leigh Brackett’s The Sword of Rhiannon, which are both fantasy stories masquerading as science fiction.
Divide and Rule was originally serialized in Unknown in April to May, 1939. Divide and Rule is the first of two de Camp stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series. It includes de Camp’s first of two stories in the series (both of which will be reviewed this month) and Brackett’s second of three.
