Browsed by
Category: Books

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien, Part Seven: The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien, Part Seven: The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks

Comments 0 Comment

Ten years ago to the month (I started this in October), I wrote about Terry Brooks’ groundbreaking The Sword of Shannara (1977), and declared that the joy I got reading the book the first time around was something I couldn’t recapture. Time had opened a gap between the book and what I could take away that seemed uncrossable. Revisiting the book, yet again, I no longer think that’s completely true, but it’s not entirely false.

When I set out earlier this year on my journey through Tolkien’s writing, I decided to mix it up with several works clearly inspired by Tolkien, and particularly the Lord of the Rings. Bored of the Rings (reviewed here), was my first choice because it’s an explicit parody of the trilogy (and a brilliant one!).

Sword was an easy choice, as well, even if its origin story is complex and was touched by divers hands (well, six, to be precise, between Brooks and the Del Reys). I’m not sure Brooks set out to write a story that tracks so closely to the LotR in so many places, but that was result. It kicked off the mass-market success of quest trilogies featuring secret heirs in search of the foozle needed to bring down the Dark Lord in his isolated redoubt.

…

Read More Read More

Tor Doubles #29: Ian Watson’s Nanoware Time and John Varley’s The Persistence of Vision

Tor Doubles #29: Ian Watson’s Nanoware Time and John Varley’s The Persistence of Vision

Comments 0 Comment
Cover for The Graveyard Heart and Elegy for Angels and Dogs by Bob Eggleton

John Varley makes his third and final appearance in the Tor Double series in volume #29, which was originally published in January 1991. Ian Watson makes his only appearance in this volume.

The Persistence of Vision was originally published in F&SF in March 1978. It won the Hugo Award and Nebula Award as well as the Locus poll.  It was also nominated for the Ditmar Award.

Varley offers a United States which has gone through a series of boom and bust cycles. During one of the bust cycles, Varley’s narrator decides to travel from his native Chicago to Japan, but with the economy being the way it is, he isn’t able to take any form of public transportation, instead walking and relying on the occasional ride. Rather than heading straight west, he takes a more southerly route to avoid the radioactive wastes of Kansas and other Great Plains states.

…

Read More Read More

The Sword & Planet of Jack Vance: Planet of Adventure

The Sword & Planet of Jack Vance: Planet of Adventure

Comments 14 comments
The Planet of Adventure series by Jack Vance (DAW and Ace paperback editions)

Today, we come back from our excursion into the realm of Space Opera to our home territory of Sword & Planet fiction. One of the most unique S&P series I’ve ever encountered is the four-book series by Jack Vance (1916 – 2013) generally called the Planet of Adventure series. The stories take place on a planet called Tschai, and feature an earthman named Adam Reith.

In a future in which Earth has starships, a distress signal comes from Tschai, which orbits the “dim and aging” star Carina. An Earth ship is sent to investigate and is destroyed in orbit by a missile from the planet. Adam Reith and a companion escape on a scout ship and manage to make a hard landing. The companion is soon killed by the natives and Reith is left alone. The books chronicle his efforts to survive and return to Earth.

…

Read More Read More

A Hobo in Space: Starhiker by Jack Dann

A Hobo in Space: Starhiker by Jack Dann

Comments 2 comments
Starhiker by Jack Dann (Harper & Row, March 1977). Cover uncredited

It’s been a while since I’ve taken a look at a ’70s science fiction novel in this space, and this seems a good book to feature. It’s rather better than some of the books I’ve written about, though it has, as far as I can tell, never been reprinted. And it’s a very 1970s book.

Jack Dann was born in upstate New York some 80 years ago, and after spending some time in New York City moved back to Binghamton, close to his birthplace of Johnson City. He attended SUNY Binghamton, where SF writers Pamela Sargent and George Zebrowski were also students, and Joanna Russ was a Professor. (I don’t know if Dann had contact with Russ at that time.)

…

Read More Read More

Not Your Average Standard: Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

Not Your Average Standard: Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

Comments 4 comments
Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford (Faber & Faber, April 4, 2024)

This is a strange (in a good way) hybrid of alternate history (a 2023 Sidewise Award winner, in fact), syncretism, crime noir, and Christological sacrifice. Oh, and it has a little something to do with jazz, specifically that of the 1920s hot jazz era played in bars and brothels.

Let’s take these in order.  The alternate history is the invention of Cahokia, in reality a prehistoric Native American settlement around some 80 surviving earthworks today preserved as the Cahokia Mounds archeological park located directly across the Mississippi River from St. Louis Missouri, as a Prohibition-era multi-ethnic capital city in a U.S. state formed by an alliance of Native American tribes. Cahokia has its own language, and although Catholic-converted Native Americans comprise the majority, there are various ethnic communities (that’s the syncretism part), including a large African American presence, and, as you might expect, tension among them.

…

Read More Read More

Deadly Aliens: Adapting Richard Matheson’s third Kolchak script, Night Killers

Deadly Aliens: Adapting Richard Matheson’s third Kolchak script, Night Killers

Comments 1 comment


Kolchak the Night Stalker: Double Feature by Richard Matheson and
Chuck Miller (Moonstone, November 2017). Cover art by Mark Maddox

I’ve been asked over the years about the process I used to adapt the late Richard Matheson’s unproduced script for “The Night Killers” into a novella. I thought I’d go ahead today and give a few brief answers.

First, to address the changes I made in the story: It’s not that I think I’m more talented than Richard Matheson, because manifestly I am not. But what I had was very much a first draft script. If “The Night Killers” had gone into production, a lot of things would have been reworked, based on input from Matheson himself, the director, and certainly Darren McGavin. So that’s how I approached it. I regarded the script as a living document that I could have a hand in shaping.

…

Read More Read More

A Halloween Reading List

A Halloween Reading List

Comments 4 comments


Ace Double #42900: Tower of the Medusa by Lin Carter, and Kar Kaballa by
George H. Smith (Ace Books, November 1969). Cover art by Jeff Jones and John Schoenherr

I’m working on a Halloween entry for the Swords & Planet League, and on a couple of posts about Jack Vance. In the meantime, I thought I’d run a few covers of books I’ve got in the house here but haven’t actually read yet.

First up are three doubles featuring Lin Carter, two from Belmont and one from Ace. The Tower of Medusa is from Ace, with the backing book being Kar Kaballa by George H. Smith. Some reviews call it S&P but a quick scan suggests more Space Opera to me. After I read it, if it’s S&P, I’ll discuss it further. Cover artist is listed as Kelly Freas but I saw someone claim it has a signature reading “Jones” and that it was Jeffrey Jones. This does not look like a Jones to me and I can’t find any signature on my book.

…

Read More Read More

Spooky Sword & Sorcery for Halloween: Samhain Sorceries edited by D.M. Ritzlin

Spooky Sword & Sorcery for Halloween: Samhain Sorceries edited by D.M. Ritzlin

Comments 2 comments


Samhain Sorceries, edited by D.M. Ritzlin (DMR Books, September 24, 2022). Cover by Adam Burke

The mighty Dave Ritzlin, mastermind of DMR Books, continues to refresh his impressive backstock. Just in time for Halloween he’s re-released his popular collection of spooky Sword & Sorcery, Samhain Sorceries, with a brand new cover. Here’s Dave.

Samhain Sorceries was DMR Books’ best-received release of the past few years. With its unique concept and outstanding roster of authors, it’s not hard to see why. The fantastic new cover art was created by Adam Burke, and another of his paintings will adorn the follow-up volume, Walpurgis Witcheries, due out next spring.

Samhain Sorceries contains ten brand new tales, including a new story by Keith Taylor featuring Felimid mac Fal, hero of his classic Bard series. Order copies directly from the DMR website. And if you’re a fantasy author, note that submissions for the follow-up volume, Walpurgis Witcheries, are open until October 31st.

The Heroic Fantasy of C.L. Moore

The Heroic Fantasy of C.L. Moore

Comments 8 comments
Jirel of Joiry (Ace Books, November 1982). Cover by Stephen Hickman

While Edmond Hamilton introduced me to Space Opera, his wife, Leigh Brackett, and another woman writer, Catherine Lucille Moore (1911 – 1987), showed me the kind of emotional power these stories could wield. Moore was an influence on Brackett, and both of these writers wrote beautiful and poetic prose, which is something I always look for in the books I take home with me, although it’s not something I often find. (Robert E. Howard was another writer who could create that kind of prose, and both Moore and Brackett acknowledged him as an influence.)

Moore is known today for two genres that she did stellar work in. Neither of those is Sword and Planet, but one of them is Sword & Sorcery. Her Jirel of Joiry stories are exotic and luminescent. Jirel is one of the earliest flame-tressed female warriors in fantasy fiction. Depending on how far afield I eventually travel with this series, we may well come back to Jirel.

…

Read More Read More

From Traveller to Tantalizing Fiction: Torchship by Karl K. Gallagher

From Traveller to Tantalizing Fiction: Torchship by Karl K. Gallagher

Comments 0 Comment


Torchship by Karl K. Gallagher (Kelt Haven Press, December 9, 2015). Cover by Stephanie G. Folse

In the introduction to his first collection of short fiction, Unmitigated Acts (the title comes from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Female of the Species”), Karl Gallagher reflects on the history of the series: “I have a fondness for ‘rag tag crew on ramshackle ship’ stories” (p. 5). His first book, Torchship, published in 2015, is exactly that kind of story. Its setting is a nostalgic one: A starship, the Fives Full, navigated with paper charts and slide rules, like something from a Heinlein juvenile!

But there’s more to this than nostalgia. Gallagher’s interstellar future has a history, one in which artificial intelligence has come to be seen as an existential threat. How to deal with this threat is a central political issue that drives much of the plot. It’s more or less in the background in this first volume; in the sequels (Torchship Pilot and Torchship Captain), the entire plot emerges from it.

…

Read More Read More