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An Obscure 70s Fantasy: The Vanishing Tower, by Michael Moorcock

An Obscure 70s Fantasy: The Vanishing Tower, by Michael Moorcock

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The Vanishing Tower (DAW Books, June 1977). Cover by Michael Whelan

Here’s another in my series of reviews of “mostly obscure” 1970s/1980s books — the last one was of Evangeline Walton’s The Children of Llyr. That book was published in 1971, and so was the original edition of The Vanishing Tower (first titled The Sleeping Sorceress.)

And already I can hear people asking “Obscure? Obscure?! Evangeline Walton’s Mabinogion retellings were not really obscure, and Michael Moorcock’s Elric novels are not remotely obscure!”

And I apologize — because you’re right. This novel in particular is part of one of the major sword and sorcery series of all time. Yet — as with the The Children of Llyr — it’s a book I myself didn’t read until just now, over 50 years after it first appeared.

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Half A Century of Reading Tolkien Part Ten: Beren and Lúthien edited by Christopher Tolkien

Half A Century of Reading Tolkien Part Ten: Beren and Lúthien edited by Christopher Tolkien

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So it was, but it is said that in recompense Mandos gave to Beren and to Lúthien thereafter a long span of life and joy, and they wandered knowing thirst nor cold in the fair land of Beleriand, and no mortal Man thereafter spoke to Beren or his spouse.

from The Quenta Silmarillion

When I wrote about The Silmarillion last year, without much detail, I described the story of Beren and Lúthien as the great love story of Middle-earth. Inspired by Prof. Tolkien’s love for his wife, Edith, as well as the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, its narrative is integral to the events of The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn’s lineage goes straight back down the millennia to the couple, as does Elrond’s.

Christopher Tolkien, continuing the great work he undertook to edit and publish the greatest portion of his father’s work developing the myths, legends, and tales of Middle-earth, published three books brining a jeweler’s eye to the three great tales contained with The Silmarillion; The Children of  Húrin (2007), Beren and Lúthien (2017), and The Fall of Gondolin (2018). Much more than with The Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien digs deeply into the evolution of the story, presenting multiple versions and commentary.

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Murder and Courtship: Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers

Murder and Courtship: Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers

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Strong Poison, by Dorothy Sayers (Avon Books #328, 1951)

In Strong Poison, Sayers gives Peter Wimsey a love interest, and makes this central to the story. Traditional mystery writers had avoided this kind of plot (Irene Adler, for example, was clearly not romantically involved with Sherlock Holmes, however profound an impression she made on him).

Not all of her readers welcomed the innovation. In particular, Harriet Vane, a successful author of detective stories, was sometimes looked at as what fan fiction readers now call a “self-insertion” by Sayers — a view that gains plausibility from Vane’s involvement in a love affair, given what we know now about Sayers’s life story.

We first meet Vane in a courtroom, where she is being tried for the murder of her former lover, Philip Boyes, a less successful but more artistically pretentious novelist (what little is said of his books suggests Aldous Huxley’s early novels, before Brave New World made him immortal).

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La Belle Dame sans Merci: Tam Lin by Pamela Dean

La Belle Dame sans Merci: Tam Lin by Pamela Dean

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Tam Lin (Tor Books paperback reprint edition, April 1992). Cover by Thomas Canty

There’s been a lot of genre fiction set at schools. Hogwarts is an obvious example, but such settings were around long before Harry Potter; Heinlein’s Space Cadet, The Uncanny X-Men, and Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea were all there first. Tam Lin is another early example, published six years before Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone made scholastic fantasy a best-selling subgenre.

But it has an important difference: Its setting, the fictional Blackstock College, doesn’t teach magic, or superheroic combat, or spaceflight, or anything else fantastic. It’s a fairly typical small liberal arts college (based on the real college where Pamela Dean did her undergraduate work) where the supernatural elements are hidden beneath the surface.

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Horror and Gothic, Magic and Witchcraft: The Dark of the Soul, edited by Don Ward

Horror and Gothic, Magic and Witchcraft: The Dark of the Soul, edited by Don Ward

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The Dark of the Soul (Tower Books, 1970)

Here’s another anthology I picked up because it had a Robert E. Howard story in it.

The Dark of the Soul, edited by Don Ward, A Tower book, 1970. Cover artist unknown. It contains a short story by Robert E. Howard called “The Horror from the Mound.” It’s a good story, although not one of Howard’s best.

This collection is more horror and gothic, magic and witchcraft, and not Sword & Sorcery (S&S). The stories are atmospheric but maybe slow for modern audiences. Here are my thoughts.

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What’s For Dinner? The Library at Hellebore by Cassandra Khaw

What’s For Dinner? The Library at Hellebore by Cassandra Khaw

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Art by Vladimir Logos

I’ve lost count of novels that involve some sort of magical college featuring adolescent misfits plucked from humdrum daily existence thrust into contests between good and evil, not to mention raging hormones.

Blame Harry Potter, though Rowling was building on the trope, not inventing it (c.f., in particular, A Wizard of Earthsea). She just got wildly successful with it. So why shouldn’t others also build on that success?

Granted there is nothing new under the sun; no one is irked that Maggie O’Farrell did yet another riff on a Shakespeare play with Hamnet. Even so, not to knock the whole dark academia thing, I can understand how some might sneer at yet another mystical schoolyard fantasy.

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A Curious Amalgam: Joan and Peter by H.G. Wells

A Curious Amalgam: Joan and Peter by H.G. Wells

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Joan and Peter by H.G. Wells (Macmillian, first American edition, 1918)

Science fiction fans naturally know H.G. Wells best for his scientific romances. But after 1905, he wrote relatively little in that genre. Instead, he turned his efforts variously to the Fabian Society, Britain’s indigenous socialist movement; to surveys of human knowledge for general audiences, in the style later followed by Isaac Asimov (I read my grandmother’s copy of The Outline of History, and I still have the four volumes of The Science of Life); and to realistic novels, starting with Love and Mr. Lewisham in 1900.

Joan and Peter is a curious amalgam of these interests — a realistic novel about changing class relations and cultural attitudes in England, much of whose storyline focuses on the problems of the English educational system as experienced by its title characters. This gives Wells a chance to explain things to his readers, though he’s often fairly good at enlivening the presentation beyond big lumps of exposition.

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Neverwhens: Existential Horror and Medieval Mystery Play meet in Between Two Fires

Neverwhens: Existential Horror and Medieval Mystery Play meet in Between Two Fires

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Last week, I had the dumb good luck to be sitting to dinner with Christopher Buehlman just after the news came out that Nightfire’s new edition of Between Two Fires had hit #4 on the Bestseller list.

I want the record to show I was on the BTF train long before that.

Indeed, Buehlman, who’s garnered a lot of (deserved) attention for his recent fantasy novels The Black Tongue Thief and The Daughter’s War, had a previous career writing horror, including some of the most creative horror novels (IMO) of the 21st century I have had the privilege to read, and definitely one of the best vampire novels of all time (The Lesser Dead).

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Warlocks and Warriors: Two Sword & Sorcery Anthologies edited by L. Sprague De Camp and Douglas Hill

Warlocks and Warriors: Two Sword & Sorcery Anthologies edited by L. Sprague De Camp and Douglas Hill

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Warlocks and Warriors, edited by L. Sprague De Camp
(Berkley Medallion, January 1971). Cover by Jim Steranko

Warlocks and Warriors (1970) was edited by L. Sprague De Camp, who did quite a few anthologies around this time while also busy editing and rewriting Robert E. Howard’s Conan tales. It’s certainly a good collection, and quite varied, though not all these fit the heroic fantasy label associated with the collection. Certainly, not all are Sword & Sorcery (S&S). The cover is by the great Jim Steranko.

The anthology contains:

An intro by de Camp
“Turutal” by Ray Capella
“The Gods of Niom Parma” by Lin Carter
“The Hills of the Dead” by Robert E. Howard (a Solomon Kane tale)
“Thunder in the Dawn” by Henry Kuttner (Elak of Atlantis)
“Thieves’ House” by Fritz Leiber (Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser)
“Black God’s Kiss” by C. L. Moore (Jirel of Joiry)
“Chu-Bu and Sheemish” by Lord Dunsany
“The Master of the Crabs” by Clark Ashton Smith (Zothique)
“The Valley of the Spiders” by H. G. Wells
“The Bells of Shoredan” by Roger Zelazny (Dilvish)

The Ray Capella story, “Tutural,” is set in Robert Howard’s Hyborian Age but is not about Conan or a “Clonan.” One might consider it fan work but it’s quite well written. Capella’s full name was Raul Garcia-Capella (1933 – 2010), and you’ll sometimes see his work under just Raul Capella.

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Molding Rebellion: Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Molding Rebellion: Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Alien Clay (Orbit, September 17, 2024). Cover design by Yuko Shimizu

Mushrooms in the cellar. Brood parasites. Puppet masters. Body snatchers. The Borg.

Resistance is futile.

But what, exactly, are we resisting?

Possession by alien entities into some kind of hive mind may have been inspired by studies of the social behaviors of ants; indeed, aliens are often depicted as bugs that threaten to unseat humankind’s self-awarded seat at the top of the evolutionary pyramid.

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