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One of the Finest Achievements of Heroic Fantasy in the 20th Century: Dilvish, the Damned by Roger Zelazny

One of the Finest Achievements of Heroic Fantasy in the 20th Century: Dilvish, the Damned by Roger Zelazny

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Dilvish, the Damned (Del Rey, November 1982). Cover by Michael Herring

Roger Zelazny was unquestionably one of the great American fantasists of the 20th century. That’s not to say he was perfect. His woman characters were often 2-dimensional, and he paired an unwillingness to work with an outline (“Trust your demon” was his motto) with a fondness for projects that really needed an outline.

But perfection is boring. Zelazny rarely is. Much of Zelazny’s work is on my always-reread list, anyway. He had a nifty way of putting things, and in describing the Amber series he brilliantly expressed the kind of fiction I love best and have often tried to write: “philosophic romance, shot through with elements of horror and morbidity.” Philoromhorrmorbpunk. That’s my genre. Or you could just say sword-and-sorcery.

Some people doubt whether Zelazny counts as a sword-and-sorcery writer, but he didn’t doubt it. He described not only the Corwin novels but also big chunks of Lord of Light as sword-and-sorcery. Some people think that a story only counts as S&S if it has a Clonan at its center, but as far as I’m concerned, if you’ve got an outsider hero on a personal mission in a landscape of magical adventure, and there are swords or other edged weapons, you’ve got sword-and-sorcery.

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Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Three – The Two Towers by JRR Tolkien

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Three – The Two Towers by JRR Tolkien

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Gollum sat up again and looked at him under his eyelids. ‘He’s over there,’ he cackled. ‘Always there. Orcs will take you all the way. Easy to find Orcs east of the River. Don’t ask Sméagol. Poor, poor Sméagol, he went away long ago. They took his Precious, and he’s lost now.’

‘Perhaps we’ll find him again, if you come with us,’ said Frodo.

‘No, no, never! He’s lost his Precious,’ said Gollum.

Sméagol from The Taming of Sméagol of  The Two Towers

When I was younger, The Two Towers (1954) seemed to suffer from middle-book syndrome: the bits after the start of series that had to be trudged through in order to reach the exciting end. Not all of it — it does feature a big battle complete with magic and explosives — but Frodo, Sam, and Smeagol’s trek to Mordor sometimes felt as arduous for me to read as it was for them to cross the swamp and slag heaps. Now, I believe The Two Towers, and the second half, The Ring Goes East, is the heart of the whole series. Nowhere does Prof. Tolkien speak more clearly on the weight of war, the burden and necessity of standing against evil, and the eroding effects of that duty.

The Two Towers has some of the most powerful writing in all the trilogy. There are several passages that have never failed to move me. That one of the most powerful of these lines was taken away from Sam  carelessly given to Bad Faramir (more on that atrocity later), is one of the greatest crimes among the many I hold against Peter Jackson.

It’s the book of the trilogy that contains the most obvious references to Tolkien’s own service at the Somme in 1916. In the comments on my first article in this series, Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part One, K. Jespersen wrote that the books tasted of ashes, a flavor he linked directly to the First World War. I don’t tastes ashes in the books myself, but there are chapters redolent  of them.

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Following in the Steps of Robert E. Howard: The Eye of Sounnu by Schuyler Hernstrom

Following in the Steps of Robert E. Howard: The Eye of Sounnu by Schuyler Hernstrom

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The Eye of Sounnu (DMR Books, May 3, 2020)

The concept of barbarism vs. civilization is a topic that Robert E. Howard often explored in his incredibly crafted fiction. Other authors, many inspired by Howard, have explored the concept through their own creations.

Notable among these is modern sword-and-sorcery author Schuyler Hernstrom, whose collection of short stories, The Eye of Sounnu, was published by DMR Books. The collection contains a wonderful story called “Mortu and Kyrus in the White City,” which features northland, pagan barbarian (Mortu) and his learned companion (Kryus), a monotheistic monk who suffers a curse and now lives in the body of a monkey — but that does not preclude him from waxing philosophically about the world and mankind’s place in it.

There was an exchange between the two that I recently read, and I had to reread it, and then reread it again, because I enjoyed it so much, so I share it here, for my friends of similar interests.

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Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Two – The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Two – The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien

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‘I will take the Ring,’ he said, ‘though I do not know the way.’

Frodo from The Council of Elrond from The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)

I never saw it, but once upon a time, some hippies and ancillary types were given to emblazoning FRODO LIVES on bedroom walls and the backs of denim jackets. The Lord of the Rings, the literary creation of a conservative Oxford University professor of English Literature and Language, had somehow hit a chord with the nascent counterculture after its publication in 1954/1955. I imagine, in fact, I know, there are all sorts of popular and academic works purporting to explain why this was. I’ve never been interested in them, preferring the books themselves to present the professor’s ideas.

I have my own, if not particularly original, theories. First, it’s a great adventure story featuring a small, ineffectual-seeming hero who stands up to his world’s greatest force of evil. Second, it came to be seen as a sort of rallying cry against the dark powers of the modern world. I don’t know Prof. Tolkien’s politics, though I suspect he was a small-c conservative. It’s clear he viewed the loss of tradition and the dark Satanic mills blotting out the green and pleasant England of his youth were a terrible assault on civilization (this anti-modernist attitude is an important element of Michael Moorcock’s disdain for him). Third, the counterculture’s love for anything pastoral and ante-technological was probably the most important reason for its breakout into the mainstream’s consciousness.

I never discussed it with him, but I feel confident when writing that my father liked The Lord of the Rings primarily for the first reason and somewhat for the second (he was very much a BIG-C conservative) a bit. He most definitely did not like it for the last. When I first read it all that mattered to me was that first reason. With every revisit over the ensuing decades, I’ve discovered something new. That has carried on with my most recent reread.
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Midnight Rambles: H.P. Lovecraft in Gotham by David J. Goodwin

Midnight Rambles: H.P. Lovecraft in Gotham by David J. Goodwin

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Midnight Rambles: H.P. Lovecraft in Gotham (Empire State Editions, November 7, 2023)

David J. Goodwin’s Midnight Rambles: H.P. Lovecraft in Gotham provides a narrow and deep slice of H. P. Lovecraft’s biography, detailing his personal and professional life during the few years he lived in New York City. Deeply researched and full of connections, Goodwin provides correction to some long-held Lovecraft biographical details and does not flinch from detailing Lovecraft’s innate hostility to non-WASP groups, ably describing it in the context of a deeply racist and anti-semitic society.

There are very few people who can claim to be expert on the life and work of H.P. Lovecraft, and Goodwin’s book puts him in range of that small number (such as S.T. Joshi). As he’s written and presented about Lovecraft more than half a dozen times, Goodwin seems poised to rise to stand among the critics named when the storied and controversial author rises in conversation, if he’s not there already. Learn more about Goodwin here.

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Spies, Cowboys, Anarchists, O My: Polostan by Neal Stephenson

Spies, Cowboys, Anarchists, O My: Polostan by Neal Stephenson

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  Polostan (William Morrow, October 15, 2024). Cover art uncredited

If, like me, you are a Neal Stephenson fan, you know he has a tendency to get deep into the descriptive weeds. I sometimes imagine his editor suggesting, “Neal, do we really need all this detail?” And then Neal grouchily responds, “If I didn’t think the story needed it, I wouldn’t have written it.”

Case in point from his latest novel, Polostan, a depiction of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair Century of Progress exhibition where the protagonist, Dawn Rae Bjornberg, also known as Aurora Maximovna Artemyeva, works shilling for a shoe salesman:

She went to the fair early and stayed late, for the work was easy and there were plenty of diversions — that being the point of a fair.  Her perambulations soon made her as conversant with the place as if it were an old city…As they were meant to, [the exhibits] drew visitors: 600 Norge salesmen on the B&O from Philly; 176 newsboys on the New York Central from Buffalo; 60 Episcopal bishops; 180 Civilian Conservation Corps workers en route to turpentine camps in the southeast; 100 Minnesota National Guard troops. Paramount Studios executives from Hollywood, Lions from St. Louis, Shriners from Fort Smith…

It goes on like this for quite a while.  Do we really need to know that “Five hundred employees of the National Carbon Coated Paper Company of Sturgis, Michigan, arrived on the same train as 270 members of the Jewish Socialist Verband from New York City.” Probably not; it doesn’t further the plot, though it does provide a sort of Proustian vibe.

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A Locked Tomb Mystery in Space: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

A Locked Tomb Mystery in Space: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

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Gideon the Ninth (Tor Books, September 10, 2019). Cover by Tommy Arnold

The back cover of the hardcover edition of Gideon the Ninth features this assessment from writer Warren Ellis: “The author is clearly insane.”

Three things made me shunt Gideon the Ninth to the front of my TBR stack. First, both my older son and his girlfriend read it, and, once finished, they promptly named their cat Harrow after one of the two main characters. Second, the cover art jumped out like an All Hallows spotlight. Third, that Ellis quote grabbed me by the frontal lobes. A novel featuring skeletons and sword-wielding necromancers written by a writer five cans short of a six-pack? Sign me up, buttercup.

Finally, in the interests of truth-telling or perhaps over-sharing, I must add that a fourth element convinced me to delve into Gideon the Ninth, and that was when I spotted a copy on the shelves at Chaucer’s Books in California, and cracked the cover to explore the opening paragraph. It reads as follows:

In the myriadic year of our Lord –– the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death! –– Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

I was hooked. There’s nothing like a practical protagonist. Sword and shoes, check. Dirty magazines? Clearly a must. Next stop, adventure!

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You Will Know—Singularity! Singularity Sky by Charles Stross

You Will Know—Singularity! Singularity Sky by Charles Stross

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Singularity Sky UK edition (Orbit, 2005). Cover by Lee Gibbons

There’s a backstory to my reviewing Singularity Sky. Its 2003 publication date made it chronologically eligible for the 2004 Prometheus Award for Best Novel. But it was Stross’s first book publication, and none of the Libertarian Futurist Society’s members happened to read it until that year’s finalists had already been chosen.

However, there was a campaign to write it in, and in fact it received a substantial number of votes, though not quite enough to win; had it been nominated, it might well have won. Now, much later, it’s eligible for the Hall of Fame Award, which can go to works at least twenty years old — and it’s been nominated for that award. As the chair of the committee that chooses Hall of Fame finalists, I’ve just finished rereading it.

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Reading Leigh Grossman’s Sense of Wonder, the Longest Science Fiction Anthology Ever

Reading Leigh Grossman’s Sense of Wonder, the Longest Science Fiction Anthology Ever

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I have finished reading Sense of Wonder

Having just finished reading arguably the longest anthology of science fiction, I’ve written down some notes and thoughts.

TL;DR It’s an insanely long book, worth buying but not necessarily reading cover-to-cover.

About the Book

Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction, edited by Leigh Grossman, is a massive single-volume anthology of science-fiction. Don’t be fooled by the 992 print pages because that is with a tiny font. I read the Kindle version for which Amazon gives an average reading time of 140 hours. That is about 5 times as long as Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (itself a 1,200 page door-stopper). All in all, a huge dose of SF.

The book is classified and marketed as a textbook for teaching SF courses and rightly so. Besides over 150 stories (from short stories to novellas), it contains biographical entries about each author and additional essays about related topics. The appendices give advice to aspiring authors on writing and submitting SF stories.

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Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part One

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part One

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I’ve been trying to remember when I first read The Lord of the Rings and it must’ve been when I was ten or so, meaning in 1976 or early 1977. I say this because my dad bought me The Silmarillion for Christmas and it was published in September 1977. That means I read The Hobbit when I was nine or so. Coming up on 59 next year, it means I’ve been reading Prof. Tolkien’s work for nearly fifty years.

Rankin & Bass Bilbo and Gollum

I assume I came across The Hobbit on my dad’s shelf next to his living room chair. It’s where he kept the various books he was reading at any given time. His habit was to stay downstairs till midnight or one, reading and listening to WQXR, the New York Times’ old classical station. I’d definitely read it before November 1977 when the Rankin & Bass The Hobbit premiered. As a side note, my dad tried to get our first color TV before it aired, but he wasn’t able to.

I didn’t read LotR right away, but when I did, I found myself in competition with my dad to finish them. With only the single set of books in the house, we read them in tandem. I remember rushing home from church to see if I could grab The Fellowship of the Ring before my dad had finished reading The New York Times that morning. Even though some days I got the book before him, he read faster and more often and finished several days before me. Hey, I was only ten.

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