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The Sword and Planet of Del DowDell

The Sword and Planet of Del DowDell

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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 Prescot books I loved.

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After Fifty Years: Childhood’s End

After Fifty Years: Childhood’s End

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Like a lot of people, I fell under science fiction’s spell during those intermediate years when childhood blurs into adolescence, and fortunately for me, there was a thrift store around the corner from my middle school, with shelf after dusty shelf of used paperbacks that you could buy for twenty five or thirty cents apiece. Every day when school was over, I would take my lunch money and go there and, attracted by the outlandish, gaudy covers, spend my daily seventy-five cents on sf paperbacks (sorry, Mom).

My first discoveries and greatest loves were Robert A. Heinlein’s juveniles and his Stranger in a Strange Land (way too young to be reading that one), Isaac Asimov’s robot stories (I had a thing for Susan Calvin), and Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles and his wonderful, phantasmagoric short story collections S Is for Space and R Is for Rocket. Along with volumes from the anthology series like Star and Spectrum that were once so common and sadly no longer are, these books and authors formed the haphazard curriculum of my science fiction education.

One author was largely missing from my course, though — Arthur C. Clarke. Oh, I had read the three classic stories that turned up in so many of those anthologies — “The Star”, “The Nine Billion Names of God”, and “The Sentinel”, but of Clarke’s many novels, the only one I read back then was his 1953 evolutionary drama, Childhood’s End. Like Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land but for different reasons, I was too young (fourteen) to fully appreciate the book; I liked it well enough, but it didn’t spur me on to read any of Clarke’s other novels.

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Planet Stories: Sojan the Swordsman/Under the Warrior Star by Michael Moorcock and Joe R. Lansdale

Planet Stories: Sojan the Swordsman/Under the Warrior Star by Michael Moorcock and Joe R. Lansdale

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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.

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A (Qualified) Vindication of Lin Carter’s Fiction: Kesrick

A (Qualified) Vindication of Lin Carter’s Fiction: Kesrick

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Care to join me in a Pavlovian conditioned reflex experiment? Good. I’m going to ring a bell and we will observe your response. Ready?

Lin Carter. (That was the bell.)

Hmmm… exactly as I expected. At the mention of the name of the late fantasy editor, anthologist, and author, you immediately whispered, muttered, or shouted some variation of the formula, “His great knowledge and advocacy of classic fantasy, especially through his groundbreaking editorship of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series from 1969-75, means that every lover of fantasy owes him an immense debt, but his own fiction, primarily pastiches of Robert E. Howard and (especially) Edgar Rice Burroughs, is plodding and rote and not worth reading.”

Good boy! A tasty dog treat for you!

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Crafting Sword & Planet: Swords of Talera and Other Tales by Charles Gramlich

Crafting Sword & Planet: Swords of Talera and Other Tales by Charles Gramlich

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Strange Worlds, edited by Jeff Doten, containing the Sword & Planet tale “God’s Dream” by Charles Gramlich (CreateSpace, September 26, 2011). Cover by Jeff Doten

In 1998, my first novel Swords of Talera ran as a four-part serial in Startling Science Stories. It won the “Reader’s Choice” award for each issue it appeared in. The pleasure of having the book first published that way was sweet — the same way that Edgar Rice Burroughs, Otis Adelbert Kline, and Robert E. Howard had much of their stuff published.

After I’d finished Swords of Talera in 1983, I’d started a sequel called Wings over Talera but only wrote the first two chapters. My grad school work was intensifying and it seemed silly to write a second book in a series when the first book hadn’t even been submitted to any publishers. After Swords sold, though, I immediately set to work on the sequel. It was published as a four-part serial in Alien Worlds: Beyond Space and Time, a sister mag to Startling Science Stories.

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Tor Double #16: James Tiptree Jr.’s The Color of Neanderthal Eyes and Michael Bishop’s And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees

Tor Double #16: James Tiptree Jr.’s The Color of Neanderthal Eyes and Michael Bishop’s And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees

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Cover for The Color of Neanderthal Eyes by Dave Archer
Cover for And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees by Brian Waugh

And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees was originally published as a stand-alone novel by Harper & Row in March, 1976. The story lends takes its title from the poem “You, Andrew Marvell,” written by Archibald MacLeish, which also provided the title for Black Gate contributor Rich Horton’s blog. The poem is a look at the transience of empires, and Michael Bishop’s story follows suit.

In fact, published in the month following Vance’s The Last Castle and Silverberg’s Nightwings, And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees almost gives the feeling that the Tor Double series was a collection of stories about the collapse of civilization. In And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees, Michael Bishop describes and alien world which was settled by humans fleeing Earth six millennia before. By the time of the novella, they have split into warring factions and outright battle appears to be just over the horizon.

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The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part VI: Charles Nuetzel

The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part VI: Charles Nuetzel

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Warriors of Noomas (Powell, May 1969). Cover by Albert Nuetzel

Back when the internet was young and I was in a group called REHupa, The Robert E. Howard United Press Association, I heard about Charles Nuetzel, who’d written some Howard-like and Burroughs-like tales.

I’d stumbled on his book called Warriors of Noomas. After a search on the net, I found an email address and sent one flying into the void. I wasn’t sure he was even alive, but he answered and we became frequent correspondents and friends. He too was a huge fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs and quite a bit of his writing was ERB inspired. He’d become a pulp writer and book packager for Powell Publications.

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Don’t Leave Earth Without It: Bill Warren’s Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties

Don’t Leave Earth Without It: Bill Warren’s Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties

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The 21st Century Edition

It’s getting hard to remember in this time of home streaming, but in the glory days of Hollywood, the great studios (each of which had a recognizable house style and its own particular areas of cinematic expertise) poured forth a seemingly endless river of movies in every genre you could think of, many of which have seeped so far into our subconscious as to become permanent parts of our collective culture.

Merely to name these studios and genres is to instantly summon iconic images; the MGM musical — Gene Kelly swinging around a streetlamp in the pouring rain, Astaire and Charisse dancing in the dark across a stylized Manhattan park; the John Ford western — John Wayne closing the door on hearth and home to walk alone into the desolate beauty of Monument Valley; the Warner Brothers Gangster picture — Cagney and Robinson and Bogart sneering, snarling, shooting, dying; the Universal monster movie — Karloff and Lugosi slowly stalking their victims, as implacable, as inevitable as death itself; the film noir — darkened big-city streets slick with mist and moral ambiguity; the women’s picture — Davis and Crawford and Stanwyck, selflessly sacrificing themselves for husbands and children unworthy of them, their faces glowing with the glory and agony of unrequited motherhood; the screwball comedy — Claudette Colbert bringing a car to a screeching halt by pulling up her skirt and showing some leg…

There’s something missing from this list, though, isn’t there? You bet there is, and few genres are as rich in indelible moments and images as the science fiction films of the 1950’s.

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Tor Double #15: Jack Vance’s The Last Castle and Robert Silverberg’s Nightwings

Tor Double #15: Jack Vance’s The Last Castle and Robert Silverberg’s Nightwings

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Cover for The Last Castle by Brian Waugh
Cover for Nightwings by Mark Ferrari

The Last Castle was originally published in Galaxy in April, 1966. It won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. The Last Castle is the first of two Jack Vance stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series.

The Last Castle is set on a future Earth that humans have abandoned and later returned to. With their return, they brought a civilization which was based on a strong caste system Gentlemen were humans who lived in the castles which were established across the planets. Other humans, Nomads and Expiationists, lived outside the castles and were viewed as barely more than animals. Serving the Gentlemen in the castles were the Peasants, Phanes, Birds, and Mek, various races which were brought back to Earth with the humans in order to perform certain tasks.

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A Blurb Reader’s Bill of Rights

A Blurb Reader’s Bill of Rights

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I don’t know anything about the amount or quality of your reading. You might read quickly or slowly. You might be a sprinter who favors short stories or a marathoner who fearlessly commits to one multivolume series after another. You might read one book at a time or you might be the kind of degenerate who always has half a dozen going. You might read six books a year or sixty.

Whatever the nature of your reading life, though, I’ll bet that over the course of that life, you’ve read enough blurbs to make a volume as hefty as War and Peace (my copy of which does not bear a blurb. What would it even be? “If you liked Norm MacDonald’s Moth Joke, you’ll love this!” — Conan O’Brien”? It would be interesting to figure out just how long an author has to be around before blurbs are no longer considered necessary, but that’s a conundrum for another day.)

For readers, blurbs are a fact of life. They can be helpful, like a considerate stranger who gives you directions in a strange city, and they can be annoying, like mosquitoes or those people who keep calling me, offering to buy my house, and I don’t want to sell my house!

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