Yearly Archives: 2017

My New Book

My friend Mick dropped me a line the other day asking for details on my new Pathfinder book, Through the Gate in the Sea. First off, I have to confess to me that it’s strange to think of it as “new” because I turned it over in 2015, and addressed some editorial feedback last summer. It’s felt over and done with for a while — except of course it’s never been released!

It’s the sequel to my third Pathinder novel, Beyond the Pool of Stars, which was my favorite of the Pathfinder novels published so far. I think I like this one at least as well, and there’s a new point-of-view character in it that I really enjoyed writing. Well, make that two, although one is new to the narrative.

If you liked what you saw in Beyond the Pool of Stars, with it’s Indiana Jones style search for missing treasure crossed with a Burroughsian jungle trek plus some pretty cool lizard folk characters, you’ll find more of it. I think the tension’s ratcheted up as our heroes track down clues to a lost city of Mirian’s lizard folk friend Jekka’s people, which may be fully inhabited. The problem is it lies through a mystical gate in the sea, and other people want to get there before them because of the sorcerous secrets that may lie behind.

Here’s the official descrip:

Belated Birthday

Here’s to Robert E. Howard, creator of my favorite genre, sword-and-sorcery, on the anniversary of his birth. Raise high your goblets and drink deep.

What is best about Robert E. Howard’s writing? The driving headlong pace, the seemingly inexhaustible imagination, the splendid cinematic prose poetry, the never-say-die protagonists? It is hard to pick one thing, so it may be simpler to state that Robert E. Howard possessed profound and often astonishing storytelling gifts. Without drowning his readers in adjectives (he had the knack of using just enough adjectives or adverbs, and knew to let the verbs do the heavy lifting) or slowing pace, he brought his scenes to life. Vividly.

Writer Eric Knight may have most succinctly described this particular aspect of Howard’s power in an article on Solomon Kane:

“’Wings of the Night’ features a marathon running fight through ruin, countryside, and even air that only a team of computer animators with a sixty-million dollar budget and the latest rendering technology (or a single Texan from Cross Plains hammering the story out with worn typewriter ribbon) could bring properly to life.”

New Worlds For Old

I don’t spend a lot of time talking about the Ballantine Fantasy series anymore, but it was a great introduction to the history of fantasy fiction, and I always enjoyed Lin Carter’s introductions. Thanks to these books I became much more familiar with the grandsires of most of what we’re reading today. Some were interesting in a historical way (as in — huh, so that’s where THAT idea came from), some were curiously different from what we’re reading today, and then a handful of authors crept onto my favorites list mostly due to this series, among them Lord Dunsany.

But this particular Ballantine anthology is a favorite of mine simply because it contains, so far as I know, the only printing of Lin Carter’s very best short story, “Zingazar.” He’s in full Dunsanyian mode, imitating, as he always seemed to do, someone else’s style. But THIS time he knocks it out of the park, riffing on Dunsany’s “The Sword of Welleran” to deliver what I happen to believe is a stronger tale than the master himself, a minor sword-and-sorcery masterpiece.

Morgan Holmes and I have imagined, for years, a “best of” Lin Carter collection that would get 1-2 of his good short novels and a grab bag of his best short stories. This would definitely be right in there. Heck, I like this one so much I contributed an essay about it into a Lin Carter critical studies book. Anyway, if you’ve got this book, read the tale.

Quick Update

There’s a lot going on here, mostly because I’m in a writing frenzy. First, I changed my opinion on those Conan graphic novels I wrote about last week, and you can find the updated article here.

Second, I’ve been playing a neat game a friend got me for Christmas, a solo card game where you’re helping Robinson Crusoe survive on his island. I’ll have a detailed review eventually, but for now — two thumbs up.

Third, my friend Brad, he who gifted the above mentioned Friday card game, also gave me a copy of the new Dark Horse Conan collection, King Conan: The Conqueror. Wow, its that a good read. More details on that are to come as well.

 

Revisiting Late Marvel Conan

I don’t often revise my web articles aside from addressing typographical errors, but I wanted to take another crack at this particular entry, because I don’t think it was fair or well considered. Heck, I hadn’t even finished reading one of the volumes when I wrote this.

Dark Horse has been reprinting the entire Marvel run on Conan now for multiple years. I’m a latecomer to the comic, even in reprint form, so the stories are new to me.

I read and enjoyed many of the Roy Thomas written run (volumes 1-14, although 15-17 have additional Thomas penned stories). Experimentation with reading the tales by other writers in 15-17 led me to conclude that, as promised, the non-Thomas Conan is pretty wretched, so I’ve held off reading any more until he rejoined the mag in volume 31. (I should add that I do hear good things about Priest’s run on the Marvel Conan and will probably check one of those collections out before much longer.)

But the point of this brief post is a look at these final Thomas collections, and they’re substantially better than the ones that appeared immediately following the departure of Thomas. 

Computer Woes and Happy Holidays

My own computer’s in the shop, which makes posting to the web site a little problematic. Apparently some MacBook Pros, mine among them, develop keyboard malfunctions where bit by bit more and more of the keys randomly fail to respond. In my case it started with the n key, then moved onto the c and the b keys and the “command” key. I could get any of them to work if I struck them nine or ten times, but once that began to happen with multiple keys typing became one long act of frustration.

Until I get my faithful laptop back I’ve been using my old Dell to write on. The screen attachment is halfway pulled out of the laptop and it has to remain plugged in at all times or it dies instantly — and sometimes while you’re typing it randomly jumps lines — but it’s certainly better than nothing at all and even in this state is still an astonishing piece of technology that would have blown my mind when I was a kid.

Leigh Brackett: “The Last Days of Shandakor”

Bill Ward and I had been meaning to get back to our re-read series at some point last year, but we both got busy. And so we decided to start the new year with a read of one of my favorite Leigh Brackett stories, “The Last Days of Shandakor.” It was the third read for me, but Bill was new to the tale, and so was Fletcher Vredenburgh, who we invited aboard.

Brackett, of course, was an adventure fiction pioneer and one of the main reasons that the pulp Planet Stories is remembered today (although this particular tale originally appeared in the magazine Startling Stories). She was writing grand space opera/sword-and-planet/science fiction/fantasy back in the ’50s and ’60s and continued doing so right until the end of her life, and sometimes it seems like that footnote (that she completed a first draft of The Empire Strikes Back) has overshadowed everything else she did. It shouldn’t, though. She was writing about complex characters who could easily have rubbed shoulders with Han Solo or Mal Reynolds decades before those two were ever invented. All of her tales are infused with a real hardboiled grit and… well, heck, maybe I should stop introducing and just get onto the discussion.