Archives: Heroic Fiction

Of Conan and Thieves

I don’t think I’ll ever get more than 48 pages in to Poul Anderson’s Conan the Rebel. Notwithstanding the fact I respect Anderson and have enjoyed a number of his other books, I have no intention of reading further. In those 48 pages of rather small type Conan has only appeared a handful of times, and he’s never actually done anything apart from listening to people talk. There’s been a lot of action, but always with characters to whom the reader has just been introduced. It’s pretty much been a reminder of things NOT to do while trying to tell a dramatic tale. Narratively I’m bored. Because I have a stack of other books, and less time and patience than I used to have, I am sad to say that this one’s being set aside.

Conan and The Fan Fic Writers of Doom

If I didn’t love the writing of Robert E. Howard I would probably never have bothered with any Conan pastiche. As a matter of fact, those Conan novels on store shelves in the ’70s and ’80s made me so skeptical of Conan that I didn’t try Robert E. Howard’s fiction until years later. I wrongly assumed that because the series looked cheap and mass produced that Howard’s writing would sound that way. (Robert E. Howard, of course, had NOTHING to do with the mass marketing of his character, having been dead for decades before that marketing was carried out by other hands.)

You can fit the sum total of all the Conan that Howard wrote (including some fragments and rejected stories) into one large hardback. That’s not a lot of fiction about such a great character, and so for decades people have been trying to create new tales of adventure starring Conan, mostly because they wanted MORE!

What makes those stories pastiche instead of fan fic, I suppose, is that many of these writers were paid to write it and the result was distributed widely. You would assume that meant that the work was well-edited and had some kind of consistency, but a lot of people, me among them, would tell you you’re wrong.

Conan and the Emerald Lotus

THIS is one of my favorite Conan books. You’ll note that it is not by Robert E. Howard. Howard himself actually wrote only one full-length Conan novel, as Conan was aimed at Weird Tales, a short story market. (If you’re THAT curious, you can go read up on REH at various sites.) I will add that it is my favorite pastiche Conan, ever, much as I greatly enjoy some of the John Maddox Roberts Conan novels. And it’s better than Karl Edward Wagner’s Conan novel The Road of Kings (often the default “best pastiche” answer) and ANY Conan novel by Robert Jordan.

Conan and the Emerald Lotus was written by John Chris Hocking about twenty years ago. A big fan of Robert E. Howard, noir, and Weird Tales, Hocking wrote Emerald Lotus and sent it in, unagented… and because it was so danged good the publisher snapped it up and printed it. (In case you’re wondering, that NEVER happens.) The second Conan novel by Hocking, as it turns out, is even better, and L. Sprague de Camp relayed to Hocking that de Camp and his wife were so eager to see how it unfolded that they sat together on the floor of their study turning the pages. Conan and the Living Plague, unfortunately, never saw the light of day even though it was intended to re-launch the Conan line, because the purchasers of the line seemed uninterested in anything that had come before.

Still Reading Vance

In the past I’ve usually read Jack Vance in short spurts, but this time I’ve been on a huge binge and am still enjoying the prose. The whole exploration (and re-discovery in the case of Planet of Adventure) was unfortunately sparked by the author’s death.

I’ve just closed the last page on The Planet of Adventure omnibus and I found it just as difficult to set down as I had the first time, which really says something. It has  all the usual Vancian touches: fascinating cultures, religions, and philosophies, not to mention truly alien aliens. Protagonist Adam Reith isn’t that different from Vance’s other non-satirical protagonists (like Kirth Gersen, say) but his straightforward outlook and intelligence remain refreshing, not to mention his sense of decency, his bravery, and his loyalty to friends. And speaking of friends, one of the things I like about this sequence is that there is a cast of loyal companions. Vance’s protagonists are usually lone wanderers. There’s plenty of wandering on the planet Tschai, but Reith is usually with at least one of his friends.

Interestingly, I can’t believe I never noticed this before, but it is becoming more and more clear to me that Vance had a huge impact on the first big science fiction game, Traveller. Reith is a planetary Scout, and is a jack-of-all-trades and survival expert, just like the characters in Traveller‘s Imperial Scout service. There are Traveller’s aid hostels in the Alastor books, not to mention air rafts and, perhaps more importantly there’s the general feel of independent planets in a sector but a unified sector government. In Vance, as with Traveller, every planet is a potential adventure setting. Vance, then, was a huge influence not just on D&D (the fire and forget spells, the hand and eye of Vecna) but upon Traveller‘s default setting.

Tales of the Dying Earth

I’m away from home on a borrowed laptop, so I’ll keep this short. I just wanted to drop in and say how much I enjoyed the wrap-up of Jack Vance’s Cugel’s Saga, a novel contained in the orb omnibus Tales of the Dying Earth. I just finished it about a half hour ago on this mini-vacation, after slowly savoring it during the last month, and it was pretty marvelous… although keeping in line with previous comments I’ve made on my blog, I’m not sure younger Howard would have appreciated it as much.

I’m not sure if I’m ready for more Vance right away or not, but I enjoyed it so much I think I’ll stockpile some more for later reading. I see that there’s an Alastor omnibus, which I should probably explore before I re-read his Planet of Adventure series. I love Vance’s writing, though I usually tackle it in limited doses. I have a few standalones lying around the house, as well as some other series I’ve read or partially read.

Are any of my regular visitors Jack Vance fans? What are some not-miss titles? How do the Durdane books stack up?

 

Elyana Rides Again

If it’s been quiet here, that’s because you couldn’t hear the sound of my laptop keys clicking away.

I’ve just turned my second Paizo Pathfinder novel over to, you guessed it, Paizo, and I believe it to be a better adventure than the first. That should please those of you who liked the first one (and perhaps, who knows, interest those who were less kindly disposed). Drelm and Elyana’s second adventure is now in the hands of James Sutter. I’m not sure when it will be released — that will depend in part upon how much editing the text requires and what’s in the queue ahead of it.

I’ve been running at deadlines for the better part of a year and a half now, and it’s taken a real toll on my family. So, for the next week, I’m just going to be doing some fun things WITH that family. The kids are getting older. So am I. Going forward I’m going to try to arrange things so that I’m not constantly frantic about some looming deadline.

The Perfect REH Collection

If you’re not a Robert E. Howard fan, then there’s probably not much point in reading this post any further, unless you’re simply curious. If you’ve found that you don’t like REH’s work, though, there’s nothing to see here, so move along. Shoo.

Alright, so now I’m probably mostly sharing this with fans of the stylings of REH, so you probably know that there is, finally, a wealth of material by the man to choose from in print today. For a guy who died so young he was incredibly prolific. I’ve read most of his work several times, and there’s some of it I’ll keep re-reading. Others of it, though, I won’t. For instance, Almuric. Or “The God in the Bowl.” Read it. No second helping required.

I have a long shelf of REH, including a bunch of beat up old paperbacks, all those lovely Del Reys (including the two volume best of), and Conan’s Brethren, which is sort of a “best of” featuring a whole bunch of non-Conan adventure stories. Yet as I look up at that shelf from time to time I think about which stories I would include in my very own Best Of collection.

For starters, I’d want it in one volume. And much as I enjoy and appreciate some of the stories in other genres Howard wrote for, it’s his adventure stories that really tick my clock. I don’t read and re-read “Pigeons From Hell” every few years but I darned well pull down Howard’s historicals with some frequency, or his James Allison tales, or “The Gray God Passes.” And a lot of Conan. You get the idea.

Pulp Virtues

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about some of the treasures I had in the form of one-of-a-kind pulp adventure books. In amongst the mad rush of promotions week and holiday activities, I’ve escaped into some of those adventure tales to relax.

Pulp magazines have a pretty bad reputation, and I have to say that it is fairly well deserved. A lot of what they printed is pretty dreadful, and some of what passes for exciting popular entertainment in one era leaves a pretty bad taste in another. Take the story “Death’s Domain” shown in the picture to my left. Wow, was it a cracking good mystery story with all sorts of eerie elements… until the final third, when it became the most astonishing “beat you over the head with ugly race hatred” tale I’ve yet found in my pulp adventure reading. I’m pretty good at looking past stories as a product of their time and still enjoying them, but the depiction of… well, never mind.

My point is that I want to focus on some of the stuff these pulps did right, not what a lot of them did wrong. For instance, I recently read though a minor Argosy tale of the Yukon titled “Mail Boat” by Frank Richardson Pierce. Owing to the way I inherited these stories, and the fact that I do not have an index to Argosy, I am unsure as to when the tale first appeared, but it is by a writer I’d never read, and it is fairly minor.

It is also short, so I kept reading despite it’s somewhat wooden character depictions. I would describe the writing as “workman-like.” Yet, by the end, it got me thinking about writing more than the last several of these pulp tales I’ve read.

Treasures from the Vault of Time

When people talk about unique books, they usually mean a printing of a book that’s unlike any other. They almost never mean that there is only ONE of them. Well, me being the bibliophile that I am, I have a pretty cool selection of one-of-a-kind books. A few other people may have books like them, but no one else has these particular adventures from the pulp magazine days preserved in quite this way.

To the right you’ll see a shelf above the window in my office, and beside the Harold Lamb books are ten hardback volumes. There are two other oversize volumes on nearby shelves, and two others loaned out to the mighty John Chris Hocking, bringing the total to fourteen. Every single one of them is one-of-a-kind.

If you’re a frequent visitor to my little corner of the web, you know that I spent years tracking down Harold Lamb’s fiction and getting it into print, and that I launched a search for other quality fiction from the same places — old pulp magazines that carried historical adventures. You might also have seen me write that no other pulp historical writer was as consistently excellent as Lamb. I never meant to suggest that there were no other good pulp adventure writers, or no other great historical stories! There were plenty of both. But finding those tales, ah, now that is a trick.

Harold Lamb’s Adventure Fiction

In discussion of my influences I always mention the writer Harold Lamb, but it’s a sad truth that he’s still little known today. That wasn’t always true. A few generations ago he was one of the most popular writers in one of the best (and most respected) of all pulp magazines, Adventure. Later in life his biographies and histories were award winning and well-regarded, and he was considered such an expert on the Middle-East that the state department sometimes consulted with him.

Once I discovered just how consistently excellent Lamb’s adventure fiction was it was my dream that it would be brought properly  into print, and I am extremely proud to have been intimately involved in making that happen through the Bison Books imprint of the University of Nebraska Press.

There are several things that drew me to Lamb’s fiction. When I was young it was the headlong pace and the exotic settings, so exotic, as L.  Sprague de Camp once wrote, Lamb might as well have been writing of Burroughs’ Mars. But Lamb wasn’t inventing his setting, he was enmeshed in a great deal of research at a time when detailed research meant mastering other languages and journeying to distant lands and libraries.