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Category: Vintage Treasures

In Defense of Corum, Elric’s Brother-from-a-Vadhagh-Mother

In Defense of Corum, Elric’s Brother-from-a-Vadhagh-Mother

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The Swords Trilogy by Michael Moorcock (Berkley, 1971). Covers by David McCall Johnston.

Wow, I don’t think I could agree less with a column.

Michael Moorcock is one of the tower giants of sword & sorcery and New Wave SciFi; a member of early Conan fandom who by 16 was a published author and editor, and has spent 64 years writing a vast body of work. Most of this work chronicles snapshots of his Multiverse, and the struggles of the Eternal Champion, the tortured, ever-reincarnating hero of the Cosmic Balance in the struggle between Law and Chaos. And, of course, no aspect of that hero is more famous than Elric, Doomed Prince of Melnibone, wielder of the demonic, soul-stealing rune-sword, Stormbringer. No character has perhaps come to symbolize Sword & Sorcery more, other than Conan himself (*maybe* Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser) than Elric.

Only, as Lin Carter wrote in Flashing Swords! #2:

In 1965 followed an Elric novel called Stormbringer, wherein Moorcock made the tactical error of killing off his hero and terminating the series by the simple method of blowing up the universe. Since then Mike has created many another fantasy hero, but he has recently confessed to me that he is tired of making up carbon copies of Elric: hence this story, and the good news that he is back at work, fitting new Elric tales in among the ones written almost a decade earlier…

And so, Moorcock began writing about other incarnations of the Eternal Champion (and retconning some of his earlier characters to become such). It’s quite a pantheon, but some characters are far better known than others. After our Albino Prince, the most famous must be Dorian Hawkmoon, Jerry/Jhary/jeremiah Cornelius, and Erekosë, who alone of the various incarnations, recalls his past lives, and his dark fate. It’s a mixed pantheon to be sure, with a wildly varying quality of work — I find The Jewel in the Skull, first of the Hawkmoon novels, to be one of the best novels Moorcock wrote, but still can’t get through the Jerry Cornelius tales.

But for me, none of the other incarnations quite work the way Corum Jhaelen Irsei, the Prince in the Scarlet Robe does.

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Witches, Sorcerers, and Space Citadels: Alan Brown on Swords Against Tomorrow, edited by Robert Hoskins

Witches, Sorcerers, and Space Citadels: Alan Brown on Swords Against Tomorrow, edited by Robert Hoskins

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Swords Against Tomorrow (Signet / New American Library, August 1970). Cover by Gene Szafran.

I’ve been enjoying Alan Brown’s classic science fiction reviews at Tor.com. In just the last few months he’s looked at Masters of the Vortex by E. E. “Doc” Smith, H. Beam Piper’s Space Viking, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pirates of Venus, Sterling E. Lanier’s Hiero’s Journey, and Murray Leinster’s Med Ship. That’s a pretty satisfying journey through some great 20th Century SF right there (depending on how generously you’re disposed towards “Doc” Smith, I grant you).

But I was especially intrigued by his lengthy review of Robert Hoskins’ 1970 sword & sorcery anthology Swords Against Tomorrow, a long-forgotten volume that contained five long stories by Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber, Lin Carter, John Jakes, and Leigh Brackett, including a pair of reprints from Planet Stories and an original novelette from Lin Carter. All but one are reprints — including a standalone novella by Anderson, a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser adventure, a Brak the Barbarian story, and a tale in Brackett’s famous Venus series.

This is a fine little paperback that introduced readers to some of the most popular heroic fantasy series of the era in the early 70s, and I certainly didn’t expect to see it featured so prominently at the premier genre site over half a century after it was published.

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Vintage Treasures: Dorothea Dreams by Suzy McKee Charnas

Vintage Treasures: Dorothea Dreams by Suzy McKee Charnas

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Berkley Books (1987). Cover uncredited

Suzy McKee Charnas has won virtually every major accolade our genre has to offer, including the Nebula, Hugo, and James Tiptree Jr. awards. Perhaps her most famous work is The Vampire Tapestry (1980), a non-supernatural tale of vampires with an SF premise. Her four-volume Holdfast Chronicles, which opened with Walk to the End of the World (1974), is a modern classic of feminist science fiction.

Dorothea Dreams, her fifth novel, is supernatural horror; The Washington Post called it “a ghost story — and a beautifully realised unconventional one at that.” It’s the tale of Dorothea Howard, a New Mexico artist haunted in her dreams by a ghost from the French Revolution. Midlist horror didn’t get a lot of critical notice in the mid-80s, but Dorothea Dreams did. This review from Publisher’s Weekly is fairly typical of the book’s warm reception.

For two years artist Dorothea Howard has been embedding fragments of pottery, wire and glass in the wall of black volcanic rock on her property near Taos. Her solitude is broken when her old friend Ricky, a British travel writer dying of cancer, arrives, saying simply he was drawn to visit. While trying to unravel Dorothea’s complex, frightening dreams which feature a 19th century lawyer who is a survivor of the French Revolution, Ricky urges his reluctant friend to show others the wall… Then a group of Chicano teenagers hunted by the police takes over the house… Charnas (The Vampire Tapestry) is billed as a fantasy writer, but this novel, as beautifully layered as Dorothea’s wall, is also a very human story about love and loss and continuation.

Dorothea Dreams was published by Arbor House in 1986, and reprinted in paperback by Berkley Books in January 1987. The paperback edition is 246 pages, priced at $2.95. The cover is uncredited.

See all our recent Vintage Treasures here.

Corum and Me: The Disappointment of the Swords

Corum and Me: The Disappointment of the Swords

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The Swords Trilogy (Berkley Medallion, 1977, cover by Ken Barr) and
The Chronicles of Corum (Berkley Medallion, 1983, artist uncredited).

In late 2017, I published an article at Black Gate called “Elric and Me” in which I discussed revisiting Michael Moorcock’s most famous creation. Three years later, I’ve decided to revisit another of his creations, Corum Jhaelen Irsei., the Prince of the Scarlet Robe.

I first became acquainted with all of Moorcock’s characters in the early 1980s when I discovered Elric and Hawkmoon in Appendix N of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Over the next several years, I tracked down as many of his works as I could, and my timing was fantastic since during those years, DAW was printing and reprinting nearly all of Moorcock’s fiction in reasonably easy to acquire versions.

The Corum books, however, were reprinted by Berkley in two omnibus editions. The first, The Swords Trilogy, contains The Knight of the Swords, The Queen of the Swords, and The King of the Swords. The second, The Chronicles of Corum, contained The Bull and the Spear, The Oak and the Ram, and The Sword and the Stallion. In this first of two essays, we explore The Swords Trilogy.

Over the years, I’ve read and re-read various series by Moorcock. Kane of Old Mars in 1998, The History of the Runestaff in 2010, and, of course, Elric in 2017. When I picked up the anthology Michael Moorcock’s Legends of the Multiverse in August and read the Corum story included there, I realized that I hadn’t actually re-read the Corum novels since the 1980s. Perhaps it was time to revisit them.

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L. Frank Baum’s Oz Series: #1 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

L. Frank Baum’s Oz Series: #1 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

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If we were to look at the roots of American fantasy, or even world fantasy, the writer L. Frank Baum’s influence looms large in the pre-Tolkien era. The 1939 MGM The Wizard of Oz movie is an indelible part of world culture. Canvas for impactful movie villains and the Wicked Witch of the West tops most people’s lists. The movie is so pervasive in culture that we can forget the source novels, though.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, sold 3 million copies by 1956, when it entered the public domain. Baum wasn’t keen on sequels, but the fan mail from kids proved to be a powerful pressure and he ended up writing 14 Oz books before his death in 1919. Then the publisher hired Ruth Plumley Thompson to write another 21, and some other writers came later.

I’d of course seen the movie as a child and received the third Oz book (Ozma of Oz) from a classmate in grade six. I hadn’t known that the movie was based off of books, nor that there was a vast narrative mythology in prose form. I read Ozma of Oz and was charmed with the creativity, the tone, the promise of many more adventures, and began picking up other books as I encountered them.

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Life, Death, and Different Kinds of Men: Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon

Life, Death, and Different Kinds of Men: Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon

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Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys; First Edition: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1960.
Cover art Richard Powers. (Click to enlarge)

Rogue Moon
by Algis Budrys
Fawcett Gold Medal (176 pages, $0.35 paperback, 1960)
Cover art Richard Powers

Algis Budry’s 1960 novel Rogue Moon is an unusual book. It’s relatively short, even for SF novels of its era. It’s heavily character focused. And while it deals with a fascinating mystery concerning an alien artifact, on the Moon, it’s also about the bureaucracy behind the scientists and engineers, and as much about how different kinds of men react differently to the challenges of life and the inevitability of death. The story also features two women, who use analogous means to get what they want.

There are two central science fictional premises. First, humans deal with a kind of alien strangeness that cannot be comprehended, and which in this case is usually deadly. Second is the consideration of the implications of a matter transmission device, an idea treated casually in most SF (especially in Star Trek), but that raises profound concerns about matters of the “soul” or, setting that notion aside, the consequences of simple duplication. (James Blish, to his credit as transcriber of Star Trek episodes, took on this question in his one original Trek novel, Spock Must Die! (1970).)

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Vintage Treasures: Strange Seas and Shores by Avram Davidson

Vintage Treasures: Strange Seas and Shores by Avram Davidson

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Strange Seas and Shores by Avram Davidson (Ace Books, 1981). Cover uncredited.

Avram Davidson was one of the most respected fantasy short stories authors in America during my formative years as a reader. He was nominated for the Nebula Award ten times, the World Fantasy Award nine times, and won a Hugo for his classic story “Or All the Seas with Oysters.” That’s some serious street cred right there.

He’s not well remembered today, though. Criminally, we haven’t paid much attention to him at Black Gate either (aside from a Birthday Review by Steven Silver), and that’s a serious oversight. I found his third collection, Strange Seas and Shores buried in a collection I purchased recently, and want to settle in with it this weekend. I also found this compact review at the PorPor Books Blog; here’s a taste.

In his Introduction to Strange, Ray Bradbury notes that Davidson (1923 – 1993) crafted his short stories in the mode of the renowned Saki, O. Henry, and Chesterton. That is to say, Davidson employed surprise or trick endings in his short fiction, preferring to withhold the background detail of his plots at the outset, letting these details unfold along with the narrative, with the revelation / punch line coming in the last paragraph or sentence.

Many of the entries in Strange Seas and Shores are five or fewer pages in length, so providing synopses of these tales is essentially the same thing as disclosing spoilers… Some tales use quirky or satiric humor for their revelations… Others take a grimmer tone… Some of these stories have a ‘New York City’ sensibility to them, Davidson’s home throughout most of his life. In this manner they represent a sort of alternate approach to John Cheever’s examinations of NYC life in the postwar period.

It’s interesting to observe that Davidson steadfastly adhered to the classical, or traditionalist, format for his short fiction, even as the New Wave movement overtook sf publishing. His writing is clear and unambiguous, devoid of stylish affectations, although this being Davidson, readers will need to prepare for an expanded vocabulary: ‘circumambulation’, ‘nostra’, and ‘ratiocination’, among others…. Strange Seas and Shores is dedicated reading for Davidson aficionados; those others, who appreciate short stories in the ‘classical’ mode, may also want to seek it out.

Want to know another thing I discovered about Strange Seas and Shores this weekend? It is not the same book as his 1965 collection, What Strange Stars and Skies. For the last 40 years I’ve gotten these two titles confused. Glad to get that cleared up.

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DMR Books: Swords, Sorcery, and Science Fantasy!

DMR Books: Swords, Sorcery, and Science Fantasy!

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Cover by Brian LeBlanc

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most people aren’t very happy with how 2020 has turned out. However, there have been some bright spots. For one, fans of quality Sword and Sorcery have plenty of new reading material, as I’ve released six titles so far this year through DMR Books.

Things kicked off in grand fashion with the reprint anthology Renegade Swords, which collected stories that were rare or overlooked in some way. The lead story is “The House of Arabu” by Robert E. Howard, a historical fantasy set in ancient Mesopotamia. It’s not especially well-known, as it features no recurring characters, but I think it’s one of Howard’s best. (I included it in my article “The Ten Greatest Sword and Sorcery Stories by Robert E. Howard.”) Other highlights include the unabridged, rarely reprinted version of “Necromancy in Naat” by my favorite author, Clark Ashton Smith, and a previously unpublished version of A. Merritt’s classic “The Woman of the Wood.”

Let me tell you about that…

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Why I Read Old Science Fiction Stories? (Spoiler: For Entertainment)

Why I Read Old Science Fiction Stories? (Spoiler: For Entertainment)

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“Written by authors who mostly died before we were born”

What is wrong with us?

A gazillion SF&F books get published every month, and here we are reading books written by people who mostly died before we were born. And this is Science Fiction we’re talking about! Surely that’s the genre that riffs off the present to paint a plausible future, or at least an illuminating one? Why are we still reading the old stuff?

Is it because we’re wedded to some idea of “canon”? Probably not.

Sure, it’s interesting to visit the roots of a genre, but most of us want to be also entertained in our scarce leisure time. It’s why people who like theatre come back to Shakespeare for pleasure, but mostly approach Jonson and Marlow out of intellectual interest, and why I still dip into Malory’s pulpy Le Morte De Arthur, but not the ploddy Vulgate Cycle by some Medieval French guy(s?) I forget.

Similarly, aspiring authors are well-advised to see how their predecessors managed the… choreography of certain kinds of story: there’s no point in reinventing the wheel when past generations have left so many tried and tested examples just lying around. However, that presupposes that those wheels were proven in action, that they carried along stories that were entertaining.

And, yes, given how wide the field is, we’re more likely to find common ground talking about CL Moore than China Mieville: the best place to catch your mates is outside the pub, not in its murky depths. Even so, we want to be able to rant about books we loved and why… books that we found entertaining.

And there’s that word again: entertaining.

What does the old stuff have that the new doesn’t? After all, modern SF comes in meaty tomes of 100K words, generally has plausible extrapolation, and often takes us out of our comfort zone. How can 30K of often lightly characterized and emotionally distant narrative with not much contemporary significance compete with that?

Except, that’s the point,  I think.

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Arthur C. Clarke on the Moon: A Fall of Moondust and Earthlight

Arthur C. Clarke on the Moon: A Fall of Moondust and Earthlight

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A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke; First Edition: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962.
Cover art Arthur Hawkins. (Click to enlarge)

A Fall of Moondust
by Arthur C. Clarke
Harcourt, Brace & World (248 pages, $3.95 hardcover, 1962)
Cover art by Arthur Hawkins

Earthlight
by Arthur C. Clarke
Ballantine (186 pages, $2.75 hardcover, 1955)
Cover art by Richard Powers

Arthur C. Clarke is best known for his visionary, philosophical tales of human destiny, with their explorations of the depths of time and space, their brushing contact with godlike aliens: Childhood’s End, The City and the Stars, “The Star,” “The Nine Billion Names of God,” and of course 2001: A Space Odyssey. But another type of story turns up regularly throughout his career: the near-term technological puzzle story. Prelude to Space (covered here) has its philosophical overtones, but is basically about the technical and political issues of launching a rocket to the moon. And of course the center section of 2001 is all about diagnosing a malfunctioning part, and dealing with a malfunctioning supercomputer. Famous early stories like “Technical Error” and “Superiority” dealt with issues of problematic future technology.

Clarke’s 1962 novel A Fall of Moondust is very much a story of technical problems and how they are solved (and the resolution is a happier one than those in the other titles just mentioned). Specifically, it’s about a search and rescue mission, anticipating the spate of “disaster” movies (and associated novels) about groups of civilians trapped in some situation (burning skyscraper, disabled passenger jet, and so on) and the parallel efforts of rescuers to save them, that were popular especially in the ‘70s. (In fact, Wikipedia notes this novel’s similarity to a 1978 film about a stranded submarine, Gray Lady Down.)

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