Black Gate

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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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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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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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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