Archives: Pulp

Bretwalda and Other Adventures

bretwaldaFor the first time in the last half dozen years I missed GenCon. Between the excellence of the Writer’s Symposium — which is growing at a phenomenal rate — the friends and fans to meet or reconnect with, and the sheer size of the game room stuffed full of wonderful things to see, it has become one of my must stops. Especially since it’s the only large convention that’s only a few hours away.

Alas, a perfect storm of events crowned by a family wedding made it impossible for me to attend this year. I did swing through Indianapolis the weekend of GenCon on the way to that wedding, but didn’t get anywhere close to downtown.

Elkins Again or At Last

hulk computerAs I was logging on to the interwebs this morning I received four notifications of new posts on the ‘ol web site. Traffic here hasn’t been as heavy lately — probably because I haven’t been on the site as often — so I was pleased. Except that all the posts were from trendily mis-spelled names, replies to old posts, and each was a single line of word salad encouragement rife with typos.

In short, it was spam, all from an IP in St. Petersburg. I still am awaiting some kind of explanation about how that nonsense helps anyone. Do these people get PAID to create spam? They must. And what does anyone get out of it? The mind boggles.

Right. So here’s what I MEANT to say today. Two interesting things are happening that have nothing to do with any of the problems and dilemmas we’re currently riding out in our republic.

Spring!

chicksWell, almost. You can tell it’s around the corner because of the way our favorite tree is blooming, or the way I hear chirps all day — you see, we have a half dozen baby chicks. In a few months they’ll be full-grown egg layers and will join the rest of the aging flock, but for now they need to be kept under a warming bulb and monitored closely. They have a tendency to knock over their food bowls, or simply to eat all the food quickly. They need a great deal of food for all that energy they need to grow. You can just about see a difference every day between morning and evening.

The spring projects loom just around the corner as well, including some expensive window replacement and some painting and the inevitable lawn trimming, which I’ve never much cared for. Maybe if I owned a better weed wacker I could muster more enthusiasm for the chore, but ours constantly stops, and then has to be pull started. It gets tiresome.

Rare Treasures

lybeck 1I’m still moving forward at a fast clip into the rough draft of my next book, although I’ve had a slow start this morning. Now that I’m not reading a long Conan story every week, and that the season is over for my daughter’s high school swim team, I have a little more time to read. On the docket soon are some books by friends and acquaintances, the first being an e-book I’m long overdue getting back to (sorry, Peter!).

First, though, I’m finally finishing a read through of an anthology that’s a little like a mixed tape. I discussed my collection of one-of-a-kind pulp anthologies a few years ago if you want a little more information. Each was created, compiled, and hand sewn by pulp collector Al Lybeck. The one I’m reading right now includes several short novels:

Editing Harold Lamb

bill ryan howard

Bill Ward, Ryan Harvey, & Howard Andrew Jones, World Fantasy 2010.

In February of 2011 Bill Ward interviewed me for Black Gate magazine. Back then three things I’d been involved in were coming to life within a few months of each other — my first two novels (The Desert of Souls and Plague of Shadows) and the second wave of the Harold Lamb books I assembled for Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press.

You can find the other portions of the interview at Black Gate, but given that I’m often asked how I got involved in editing the Harold Lamb books, I thought it high time to move this portion of the interview to my own site.

I’d like to thank Bill for asking such great questions. I think it was only the year before that we’d finally met in person, at Dragoncon. In the picture here we’re standing with old friend Ryan Harvey, another brilliant essayist and writer. I have a slightly glazed look because I’ve been up late at the con for several days, and we all have red eyes because we’re vampires. Ryan’s holding an anthology that one of Bill’s stories had just been printed in, Desolate Places.

Anyway, all questions are from Bill. Take it away, old friend:

Link Day

Weird Menace 1 WebIt’s been busy and sad here at Jones central. While mourning the death of an old friend my blog tour has rolled on and on, and a whole slew of folks have been kind enough to host my ramblings about my new book and the writing process. More on that in a moment.

First, I’m very excited to announce the release of a collection of grand pulpy fun featuring the work of my very good friend John Chris Hocking. As you probably know, I think the world of Hocking and his writing and wish we’d see a whole lot more of it. This collection is more than a little on the purple side, but it’s a blast, and Hocking’s tale does a wonderful job of emulating the old thriller pulps without parody.

You can find a copy and read more about it right here.

GenCon AND More on Ki-Gor

A light traffic moment in the Hall of Treasure.

A light traffic moment in GenCon’s Hall of Treasure.

I wanted to follow up on two completely unrelated posts today.

First, I’ve mentioned that I’ll be spending a lot of time at the Paizo booth in the Great Hall at GenCon in Indianapolis next week (in addition to the hours I’ll be spending on panels during the Writer’s Symposium). As I’ve mentioned in the past, the Writer’s Symposium is chock full of good panels if you’re at all curious about the industry, or about bettering your own writing — or if you just want to find out more about your favorite writers!

Here are my hours at the Paizo Booth:

The Mighty Ki-Gor, Tarzan’s Forgotten Rival

jungle-stories-spring-1945-smallIn graduate school one of my guilty pleasures was reading some pretty mindless escapist adventure. From the middle to the end of semesters things could get more than a little hectic, what with all the projects and research papers, and it was nice to be able to just pick up a story and be entertained for a while by my old friend Ki-Gor. But who’s Ki-Gor? A Tarzan clone? And how on Earth (and why?) did I get interested in reading about him?

Some years back, at Pulpcon, I was wandering around the dealer room with writer John C. Hocking and sword-and-sorcery scholar Morgan Holmes. I stopped to chuckle at a ridiculous-looking pulp cover on display at one of the booths. Jungle Stories was emblazoned upon the masthead. Below, a beautiful and clearly evil dark-haired woman loomed over a bronzed jungle-man bound to an altar. Morgan said, “That’s actually a pretty good story.”

The Great Brackett

shannach

The 4th and final Brackett collection from Haffner Press.

Only a few generations ago planetary adventure fiction had a few givens. First, it usually took place in our own solar system.  Second, our own solar system was stuffed with inhabitable planets. Everyone knew that Mercury baked on one side and froze on the other, but a narrow twilight band existed between the two extremes where life might thrive. Venus was hot and swampy and crawling with dinosaurs, like prehistoric Earth had been, and Mars was a faded and dying world kept alive by the extensive canals that brought water down from the ice caps.

To enjoy Leigh Brackett, you have to get over the fact that none of this is true — which really shouldn’t be hard if you enjoy reading about vampires, telepaths, and dragons, but hey, there you go. Yeah, Mars doesn’t have a breathable atmosphere, or canals, or ancient races. If you don’t read Brackett because you can’t get past that, you’re a fuddy duddy and probably don’t like ice cream.

A few of Brackett’s finest stories were set on Venus, but it was Mars that she made her own, with vivid, crackling prose.

Here. Try this, the opening of one of her best, “The Last Days of Shandakor.” You can find it in two of the three books featured as illustrations in this article, Shannach — the Last: Farwell to Mars, and Sea-Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories.

Anyway. On to Brackett.

He came alone into the wineshop, wrapped in a dark red cloak, with the cowl drawn over his head. He stood for a moment by the doorway and one of the slim dark predatory women who live in those places went to him, with a silvery chiming from the little bells that were almost all she wore.