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Peril on the Purple Planet

Peril on the Purple Planet

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purple planet 1With NASA announcing astonishing news about the red planet, I thought it high time to talk about the purple planet, and the perils therein.

Maybe YOU were clued in, but despite a widely advertised Kickstarter campaign the impending release – nay, even the existence – of the purple planet completely passed me by until I swung by tenfootpole.org and read an enthusiastic review of a splendid sword-and-planet setting. I determined then and there to lay my hands on the product and learn about those perils myself.

purple planet 2My verdict? If you love sword-and-planet you need it. Even if Dungeon Crawl Classics isn’t your role-playing system of choice, you need it. Hell, you might even need if if you like sword-and-planet and don’t intend to game, because it’s just a blast. And I can highly recommend getting the boxed set. In his own review at tenfootpole, Bruce Lynch laments that it could be even cooler if there are more locations, because he read only the basic adventure. Voila, there ARE, within the set.

For once, the hype on the back cover copy delivers on all that it promises. If this sounds good to you, go ye forth and buy it: “The Purple Planet: Where Tribes of man-beasts wage an endless war beneath a dying sun. Where might death orms rule the wastes, befouled winds whistle through ancient crypts, and forests of fungi flourish in the weirdling light. Where ancient technologies offer life… or a quick death.” If that doesn’t sound interesting, I won’t bother trying to convince you to look within.

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Airship Hunters Take Flight

Airship Hunters Take Flight

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Airship Hunters-smallcapra-dirigibleThis weekend I read and thoroughly enjoyed a New Pulp novel called Airship Hunters recently published by the fine folks at Meteor House. I really try and make these articles be about classic pulp, but new titles do catch my eye and while I am a fan of co-author Jim Beard’s occult detective, Sgt. Janus, it was actually the airship that caught my attention.

I first read about airships as a kid in several Edgar Rice Burroughs titles. A film dramatizing the Hindenburg disaster and then an adaptation of Thomas Harris’ Black Sunday terrified me when I was just starting grade school. My introduction to the New Pulp world in 2009 came via Airship 27 with their nifty logo on each book. I even put an airship in my second Fu Manchu novel a few years later as a result. Far and away, my crowning achievement with airships was discussing their use in two cult classic films of the early 1970s: Darling Lili and Zeppelin with one of the principals involved in their production. So yes, suffice to say if you tell me Meteor House is publishing an airship title from Jim Beard, you have my attention.

Now in all fairness, it should be noted this new title is a collaborative effort between Jim and his co-author, Duane Spurlock. I know of Duane, but I had not previously read his work. Much like Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain a century earlier with Fantomas, the two men authored alternating chapters while compiling the book. Spurlock hails from Kentucky while Beard is my fellow Ohioan. There is a distinct Midwestern flavor to the adventure which lends an undeniable charm and authenticity to the proceedings.

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New Treasures: Twelve Kings in Sharakhai by Bradley P. Beaulieu

New Treasures: Twelve Kings in Sharakhai by Bradley P. Beaulieu

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Twelve Kings in Sharakhai-small2Bradley P. Beaulieu’s Twelve Kings in Sharakhai is shaping up to be one of the major fantasy releases of the year. Our very own Howard Andrew Jones says it’s “Crammed with intrigue, suspense, and stunning action,” and Glen Cooks says, ““I am impressed…. An exceedingly inventive story in a lushly realized dark setting.” Over at SF Signal, Paul Weimer does a splendid job of explaining just how compelling and new Beaulieu’s worldbuilding is in this opening novel of an ambitious new fantasy series.

The worldbuilding is complicated, rich, and endlessly fascinating. This is fantasy that goes far beyond the Great Wall of European Medieval fantasy, to a secondary world which takes its cues from the trading cities of the Taklamakan Desert, the deserts of Middle East, and places in between. The city is a wonder of a trading capital, a rich tapestry of people and their stories. I felt like I trod the dusty streets beneath the watch of the Kings as I followed Çeda’s journey, and the gods, monsters, and magic in this world are all fresh, original and wonderfully detailed. From the ebony blades of the Blade Maidens to the dangerous rush of power from the forbidden adichara petals, the powers beyond the forces of steel and fist depicted in this world are chaotic, wild, and entrancing.

Read the complete review, “Twelve Kings in Sharakhai by Bradley Beaulieu is a Must-Read for Fans of Lush Epic Fantasy,” at SF Signal.

Twelve Kings in Sharakhai was published by DAW on September 1, 2015. It is 592 pages, priced at $24.95 in hardcover, and $9.99 for the digital version. The gorgeous cover art (click for the full wraparound cover jacket) is by Adam Paquette. Get more details at Brad’s website.

An Intoxicating Blend of Steampunk and Gothic: Jeff Vandermeer’s City of Saints and Madmen

An Intoxicating Blend of Steampunk and Gothic: Jeff Vandermeer’s City of Saints and Madmen

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City of Saints and Madmen-smallThere I was, quite happily dawdling through life, free of all unhealthy obsessions, more or less content, sleeping, eating, breathing and only occasionally contemplating suicide all without a care in the world. How can I, innocent young boy that I am, be blamed for not knowing what I was getting into when I saw City of Saints and Madmen languishing on the shelf of my local Waterstones, its nondescript, faintly pretentious cover standing out as slightly less nondescript and slightly more pretentious then all the book covers, how can I be blamed if, eager to seem like the haughty intellectual I think I am, I picked it up, plopped it on the counter and handed over the criminal £10.99? I was ignorant, I was foolish, I was young and naive and romantic. I was just trying something new, buying something on impulse because, let’s face it, my life is nothing if not a series of impulse purchases and suppressed subconscious truths like ‘Connor, maybe you shouldn’t jam that entire screwdriver down your throat.’ Don’t get me wrong, though, I don’t regret buying City of Saints And Madmen — it’s the big dog’s biscuit — it’s just that it’s too good; I’m a busy guy, you know? All this saving the world from the Neo-Nazis on the moon and wrestling bears and kissing pretty girls (right on the lips, too!) is pretty time consuming stuff — I just don’t have the time to sit and grow increasingly obsessed with ridiculously good books like this. It’s just not feasible. But I did, anyway. And I loved it.

How could you blame me, though? This book is beautiful. It’s this intoxicating blend of steampunk and gothic, the twisted and the strange, its equal parts romantic and surreal, decadent and utopic and as cynical as it is intangibly hopeful; it’s written with such indefatigable passion and energy that you can feel it sparking off the page, spilling out, breathlessly, into the room around you. It’s in the thick miasma of Vandermeer’s wonderful prose, the breathless detail of his lurid settings, the unrelenting weird of his twisted narrative. There are so many reasons you should read this book I don’t know quite where to start — it’s this huge, sprawling intimidating thing that excites on so many levels explaining it is like describing the Coliseum to a man with no eyes, and only the basest knowledge of human history.

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August Short Story Roundup

August Short Story Roundup

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oie_22035357ZM4AVpThough I spent much of August traveling, sipping drinks in distant lands (South Carolina), and taking a break from swords & sorcery, I still found time for my monthly dose of short fiction. Over the years I’ve really come to feel that it’s my obligation to get the word out to the S&S reading population about what’s going on in the land of short stories (and the occasional novella).

Swords and Sorcery Magazine #43 presented a strong issue this past month. Its two tales are by authors unknown to me, but for whom I will keep an eye open in the future.

The first, “Stragglers in the Cold,” is by Connor Perry. Theor Stormcrow is a skinchanger, refugee from the last survivors of a lost cause, and is dying of starvation. Stormcrow and his kind do not actually change into different creatures, but instead send their minds into them. Now, near death and fearing it, he has decided to commit the gravest crime of his kind: to steal the body of another skinchanger.

In a mere 3,000 words, Perry creates a complex and violent universe. As in the better S&S short fiction, “Stragglers” alludes to events outside the narrow confines of its first and last paragraphs, giving context to its characters and building atmosphere. In this case the context is a lost war, and the atmosphere is one of desperation.

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The Nightmare of History: The Plot Against America

The Nightmare of History: The Plot Against America

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The Plot Against America-smallStop me if you’ve heard this one: a dark horse, celebrity candidate with no experience in government comes out of nowhere to ride a wave of nativist populism all the way to the Republican presidential nomination – and the White House.

No, I’m not talking about The Donald, though, just as 1967 has entered American mythology as the year of the Summer of Love, here in 2015 we seem to be mired in what is destined to be remembered as the Summer of Trump. (What the two events tell us about historical progress or regress I won’t venture to say.)

Instead, I’m talking about the American hero of heroes, Charles A. Lindbergh, in Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot Against America. Though the book was received indifferently by most genre critics and readers (a fate often suffered by mainstream authors who poach on the SF preserve), Roth’s book is as genuine and full-blooded an alternate history as any of the classics of the genre – Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (1953), Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), Keith Roberts’ Pavane (1968), or any number of works by the current king of the form, Harry Turtledove.

In The Plot Against America, the story is told from the point of view of seven year old Philip Roth, a third grader living in the Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey, with his father, mother, and big brother Sandy. They are a happy, close-knit, sociable group with a circle of gregarious friends. (Think of the working class family depicted with such affection by Woody Allen in his film Radio Days.) Philip is an ordinary American kid, occupied with his school, his family and friends, and with his hobby, that epitome of nerdish inoffensiveness, stamp collecting. (In this, Philip has been inspired by President Roosevelt, himself an ardent philatelist.) The Roth family just gets by on the earnings of Philip’s father (who works as an insurance agent) aided by the efficient budgeting of his mother, but they don’t consider themselves strapped or put-upon; though they are Jews, they share with the rest of their countrymen the optimistic American creed that always expects things to get better.

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Back to Ancient Opar

Back to Ancient Opar

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king-oparexiles-khoEdgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan has proven an unstoppable force. While misguided movies, TV series, and musicals do their best to rob the ape man of his savage nature and integrity in the name of mass marketing and political correctness, Burroughs’ original Jungle Lord perseveres. Conventional wisdom may suggest time has passed him by, but it’s the vitality of the original that keeps readers coming back for more. Happily, talents like Joe R. Lansdale, Philip Jose Farmer, and most recently Will Murray have been willing to give fans further adventures of the real Tarzan.

Turn back the clock four decades and you’ll find Philip Jose Farmer’s seminal fictional biography, Tarzan Alive (1972) had much to answer for in terms of launching the Wold Newton movement in popular fiction as well as boosting Burroughs’ cachet. While the book may be relatively obscure today, the ripples it created are still felt on the beaches of pulp fiction. For his part, Farmer launched a series of officially sanctioned books recounting the history of ancient Opar. Longtime readers of Burroughs’ work will know that Opar was the first of the author’s lost cities (an outpost of forgotten Atlantis) that survived undiscovered in Tarzan’s African jungle.

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When Big Game Hunting was Glamorous: The Man-Eaters of Tsavo

When Big Game Hunting was Glamorous: The Man-Eaters of Tsavo

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1592281877The recent scandal over the killing of Cecil the Lion has once again brought big game hunting into the spotlight, with various websites outing rich hunters who go to Africa to blow away lions, giraffes, and other animals.

Here in Spain, we had an even bigger scandal back in 2012 when, at the height of this country’s financial crisis, King Juan Carlos went to Botswana and killed an elephant. He later apologized but this, plus rumors of extramarital affairs and numerous incidents of being apparently drunk in public, forced him to abdicate two years later.

There was a time when scandals like this would have never happened, when kings and commoners could empty their guns into beautiful animals free from the fear of criticism. Many wrote memoirs of going on safari, creating a genre that has all but died out today.

One of the classics of the genre is The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, by Lt. Col. J.H. Patterson and originally published in 1907. Patterson worked as the chief engineer building the Mombasa to Uganda railway in 1898. Managing a huge crew of Africans, Pathans, and Sikhs in adverse conditions to build a railroad through poorly mapped territory would have been hard enough, but soon lions started coming into the workmen’s camp at night and carrying off his workers.

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Tanith Airborne: Warhammer 40k: Gaunt’s Ghosts: The Guns of Tanith

Tanith Airborne: Warhammer 40k: Gaunt’s Ghosts: The Guns of Tanith

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The Guns of Tanith-smallThe Guns of Tanith
A Warhammer 40K novel
Volume 5 of Gaunt’s Ghosts
By Dan Abnett
Black Library (315 pages, $6.95, May 2002)
Cover by Adrian Smith

The Guns of Tanith opens with another first for the Ghosts: A training sequence. After redeeming himself for the disaster on Hagia, Gaunt and the men of the Tanith First-and-Only are being deployed to Phantine. Phantine’s industrial history spans so many millennia that most of the planet is covered by smog toxic enough to make human life impossible. The remaining Phantine cities are perched on mountains whose elevations rise above the poisonous clouds. So naturally, when the time comes to liberate Phantine settlements from the occupying forces of Chaos, ground assaults aren’t an option. Thus, en route to Phantine, we find the Ghosts in training for an aerial drop assault, supported by Phantine’s elite aerial corps.

The training sequence reintroduces us to some familiar faces: Twitchy sniper Larkin, soft-hearted giant “Try-Again” Bragg, scout leader Mkoll, and the rest of the crew, along with some relatively new arrivals, particularly Commissar Viktor Hark, who joined the Ghosts in the previous volume to supplement Gaunt’s split role as both Commissar (a kind of propaganda officer) and Colonel of the Ghosts. Hark, as neither Tanith nor Vervunhive, is in a position to be a little harsher, a little more detached, and perhaps a little more objective in his disciple than Gaunt can ever be. He’s a fair man, and fits well with the Tanith, but is more at ease with the brutal reality of a commissar’s duty to enforce iron disciple.

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We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

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oie_1452742F8rz4l3Z

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are of the same length, but I have to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

So opens Shirley Jackson’s final novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). Published three years before her death, this introduction to the book’s narrator, better known as Merricat, seems to promise readers they are in for the story of a quirky young woman. It is indeed beguiling but bears only the slightest hint of what’s to come in this short novel. It is a book built of dark and deep shadows, pierced at times by shimmering passages, before becoming darker and more claustrophobic.

Merricat lives with her sister and their crippled and addle-minded Uncle Julian in the great mansion that the Blackwoods have always lived in. Six years ago something terrible happened for which all the townsfolk hate, and perhaps even fear, the Blackwoods. One evening, arsenic found its way into the sugar bowl and the sisters’ parents, younger brother, and aunt died. Their uncle took less sugar and survived, though irreparably broken. Constance, who cooked, who never took sugar — and who cleaned the sugar bowl before the police arrived — was accused and tried. No motive could be found and she was acquitted, but she has never since left the property. Only Merricat braves the village — twice a week — to buy food, take out books from the library, and suffer the staring and unpleasant treatment of the villagers.

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