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Category: Vintage Treasures

Tor Double #18: Robert Silverberg’s In Another Country and C.L. Moore’s Vintage Season

Tor Double #18: Robert Silverberg’s In Another Country and C.L. Moore’s Vintage Season

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Cover for In Another Country and Vintage Season by Wayne Barlowe

With this volume, the Tor Double series began an experiment and also a format change. Beginning with C.L. Moore’s 1946 story Vintage Season, Tor had Robert Silverberg write a sequel, In Another Country. Depiste the book cover proclaiming it “New!,” the Silverberg piece appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine eleven month prior to its publication in the Tor Double series.  In addition, this volume was published in the standard anthology format rather than tête-bêche, perhaps reflecting the two stories’ relationship to each other as original and sequel.

Vintage Season was originally published in Astounding in the September and October 1946 issues and credited to Lawrence O’Donnell. At various times, this story has been credited to C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, Lawrence O’Donnell, or to just C.L. Moore. Tor credits Moore alone for the story.

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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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Tor Doubles: The Westerns

Tor Doubles: The Westerns

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Tor Doubles

As I mentioned last week, in January of 1990, Tor began published a second series of Tor Doubles: The Tor Double Action Western series. Running for twenty months, the books in this series were anonymously edited and packaged by Martin H. Greenberg and Bill Pronzini through Tekno Books. Not only did they differ from the science fiction series in subject matter, but also in format.

While most of the Tor SF Doubles were published as dos-a-dos format, where the book needed to be flipped over to read the second story, this series was all published in a standard format, with the second story following the first. As it happens, a month after this series was introduced, the Tor SF Double was  published in the same traditional format.

The Westerns also differed because while the SF volumes mostly included stories by different authors (with three exceptions), each of the Tor Double Action Westerns featured two stories by the same authors, essentially making each volume a two story collection.

Over the course of the twenty volumes, twelve authors were represented, with Henry Wilson Allen appearing under two pseudonyms: Clay Fisher and Will Henry, Lewis B. Patten having two volumes showcasing his work, Zane Grey stories appearing in three volumes, and Max Brand showing up in a full quarter of the books published, including the first and last volumes. Also, while most of the authors who were published in the science fiction series were alive at the time their works were printed, only three of the Western authors were alive: Allen, Steve Frazee, and Wayne D. Overholser.

The last five volumes in the series were rebranded as the Tor Double Western series.

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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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Tor Double #17: L. Sprague de Camp’s Divide and Rule and Leigh Brackett’s The Sword of Rhiannon

Tor Double #17: L. Sprague de Camp’s Divide and Rule and Leigh Brackett’s The Sword of Rhiannon

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Cover for Divide and Rule by N. Taylor Blanchard
Cover for The Sword of Rhiannon by A.C. Farley

The seventeenth Tor Double, includes two stories, L. Sprague de Camp’s Divide and Rule and Leigh Brackett’s The Sword of Rhiannon, which are both fantasy stories masquerading as science fiction.

Divide and Rule was originally serialized in Unknown in April to May, 1939. Divide and Rule is the first of two de Camp stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series. It includes de Camp’s first of two stories in the series (both of which will be reviewed this month) and Brackett’s second of three.

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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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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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The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part V: Lin Carter

The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part V: Lin Carter

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Lin Carter’s Under the Green Sun series (DAW Books)

I consider Edgar Rice Burroughs and Otis Adelbert Kline to be the first generation of Sword & Planet authors. Probably most widely known among the second generation — whether rightly or wrongly — is Lin Carter. Carter was an enthusiastic fellow who loved all things fantasy, including S&P and Sword & Sorcery. He promoted the genres, edited many collections of fantasy stories, and was a tremendously prolific author himself.

I’ve read 41 books by him and still have about a dozen on my TBR shelves. And that’s NOT counting the Conan books he was associated with. He was everywhere when I was growing up and our small town library had more books by him than by ERB himself.

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Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Six Bored of the Rings by Henry N. Beard & Douglas C. Kenney

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Six Bored of the Rings by Henry N. Beard & Douglas C. Kenney

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This book is predominantly concerned with making money, and from its pages a reader may learn much about the character and the literary integrity of the authors. Of boggies, however, he will discover next to nothing, since anyone in the possession of a mere moiety of his marbles will readily concede that such creatures could exist only in the minds of children of the sort whose childhoods are spent in wicker baskets and who grow up to be muggers, dog thieves, and insurance salesmen. Nonetheless, judging from the sales of Prof. Tolkien’s interesting books, this is a rather sizable group, sporting the kind of scorch marks on their pockets that only the spontaneous combustion of heavy wads of crumpled money can produce. For such readers we have collected here a few bits of racial slander concerning boggies, culled by placing Prof. Tolkien’s books on the floor in a neat pile and going over them countless times in a series of skips and short hops. For them we also include a brief description of the soon-to-be-published-if-this-incredible-dog-sells account of Dildo Bugger’s earlier adventures, called by him Travels with Goddam in Search of Lower Middle Earth, but wisely renamed by the publisher Valley of the Trolls.

from the Prologue — Concerning Boggies from Bored of the Rings

My introduction to Bored of the Rings (1969, a scatalogical, offensive, and dated, but hilarious, parody of The Lord of the Rings), came at the hands of a friend of mine, Karl H., during a Boy Scout camping trip in the late seventies. My first memory of Karl is him at 8 years old being carried kicking and yelling over the school custodian’s shoulder after he’d been caught trying to scale the back fence. Two years older than me, we stayed friends until he graduated high school in 1982. I saw him once more after that before he disappeared into the wilds of the West Coast. When first his sister, and then his mother passed away, I didn’t find out until weeks after the fact and missed both funerals and him.

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