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Category: Vintage Treasures

Tor Doubles #30: Poul Anderson’s The Longest Voyage and Steven Popkes’ Slow Lightning

Tor Doubles #30: Poul Anderson’s The Longest Voyage and Steven Popkes’ Slow Lightning

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Cover for The Longest Voyage and Slow Lightning by Wayne Barlowe

 

Tor Double #30 contains Poul Anderson’s third and final appearance and was originally published in February 1991. He is joined by Steve Popkes with a story original to this volume and which has not been reprinted.

“The Longest Voyage” was originally published in Analog in December 1960. It won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story, which makes it a strange choice for the Tor Doubles series, which generally published novellas, but the second story in the volume may be the longest story published in the series.

There are many science fiction stories that take historical characters and use them as the basis for a different take on the world. Robert J. Sawyer notably published his trilogy of novels Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, and Foreigner whose characters were based on Galileo, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud. In “The Longest Voyage,” Captain Rovic appears to be based on Ferdinand Magellan, leading the Golden Leaper (shades of Francis Drake’s Golden Hind) on a circumnavigation of the moon on which they live in search of the fables Aureate Cities.

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The Sword & Planet of S. M. Stirling and Al Sarrantonio

The Sword & Planet of S. M. Stirling and Al Sarrantonio

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In the Courts of the Crimson Kings and The Sky People by S.M. Stirling (Tor Books, March 2008 and November 4, 2006). Covers by Gregory Manchess

In 2006 and 2008, Tor books sought a revival of Sword & Planet fiction with two books by S. M. Stirling. It didn’t quite work out but the readers got some interesting results, including a book that is now in my top ten of S&P novels.

First up was The Sky People, set on Venus in an alternate solar system where the planets are inhabitable and inhabited, much like the solar system of ERB, Brackett, and Moore. In the acknowledgements, Stirling even thanks ERB, Brackett and Otis Adelbert Kline, and mentions the Northwest Smith stories of Moore, as well as ERB’s “Wrong Way” Carson of Venus.

Stirling posits a space race that pits the US and their allies against the Soviets for control of this habitable solar system. When they land on Venus they find a jungle world, much like the Venus of ERB. It turns out to be inhabited by both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, a mystery that is eventually solved. This one is definitely not Sword & Planet. It combines standard SF with hints of Pellucidar’s time lost world of dinosaurs and sabretooths. Fun but not stellar in my opinion.

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Half a Century of Reading Tolkien, Part Seven: The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien, Part Seven: The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks

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Ten years ago to the month (I started this in October), I wrote about Terry Brooks’ groundbreaking The Sword of Shannara (1977), and declared that the joy I got reading the book the first time around was something I couldn’t recapture. Time had opened a gap between the book and what I could take away that seemed uncrossable. Revisiting the book, yet again, I no longer think that’s completely true, but it’s not entirely false.

When I set out earlier this year on my journey through Tolkien’s writing, I decided to mix it up with several works clearly inspired by Tolkien, and particularly the Lord of the Rings. Bored of the Rings (reviewed here), was my first choice because it’s an explicit parody of the trilogy (and a brilliant one!).

Sword was an easy choice, as well, even if its origin story is complex and was touched by divers hands (well, six, to be precise, between Brooks and the Del Reys). I’m not sure Brooks set out to write a story that tracks so closely to the LotR in so many places, but that was result. It kicked off the mass-market success of quest trilogies featuring secret heirs in search of the foozle needed to bring down the Dark Lord in his isolated redoubt.

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Tor Doubles #29: Ian Watson’s Nanoware Time and John Varley’s The Persistence of Vision

Tor Doubles #29: Ian Watson’s Nanoware Time and John Varley’s The Persistence of Vision

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Cover for The Graveyard Heart and Elegy for Angels and Dogs by Bob Eggleton

John Varley makes his third and final appearance in the Tor Double series in volume #29, which was originally published in January 1991. Ian Watson makes his only appearance in this volume.

The Persistence of Vision was originally published in F&SF in March 1978. It won the Hugo Award and Nebula Award as well as the Locus poll.  It was also nominated for the Ditmar Award.

Varley offers a United States which has gone through a series of boom and bust cycles. During one of the bust cycles, Varley’s narrator decides to travel from his native Chicago to Japan, but with the economy being the way it is, he isn’t able to take any form of public transportation, instead walking and relying on the occasional ride. Rather than heading straight west, he takes a more southerly route to avoid the radioactive wastes of Kansas and other Great Plains states.

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The Sword & Planet of Jack Vance: Planet of Adventure

The Sword & Planet of Jack Vance: Planet of Adventure

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The Planet of Adventure series by Jack Vance (DAW and Ace paperback editions)

Today, we come back from our excursion into the realm of Space Opera to our home territory of Sword & Planet fiction. One of the most unique S&P series I’ve ever encountered is the four-book series by Jack Vance (1916 – 2013) generally called the Planet of Adventure series. The stories take place on a planet called Tschai, and feature an earthman named Adam Reith.

In a future in which Earth has starships, a distress signal comes from Tschai, which orbits the “dim and aging” star Carina. An Earth ship is sent to investigate and is destroyed in orbit by a missile from the planet. Adam Reith and a companion escape on a scout ship and manage to make a hard landing. The companion is soon killed by the natives and Reith is left alone. The books chronicle his efforts to survive and return to Earth.

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A Hobo in Space: Starhiker by Jack Dann

A Hobo in Space: Starhiker by Jack Dann

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Starhiker by Jack Dann (Harper & Row, March 1977). Cover uncredited

It’s been a while since I’ve taken a look at a ’70s science fiction novel in this space, and this seems a good book to feature. It’s rather better than some of the books I’ve written about, though it has, as far as I can tell, never been reprinted. And it’s a very 1970s book.

Jack Dann was born in upstate New York some 80 years ago, and after spending some time in New York City moved back to Binghamton, close to his birthplace of Johnson City. He attended SUNY Binghamton, where SF writers Pamela Sargent and George Zebrowski were also students, and Joanna Russ was a Professor. (I don’t know if Dann had contact with Russ at that time.)

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Tor Doubles #28: Kim Stanley Robinson’s A Short, Sharp Shock and Jack Vance’s The Dragon Masters

Tor Doubles #28: Kim Stanley Robinson’s A Short, Sharp Shock and Jack Vance’s The Dragon Masters

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Cover for The Graveyard Heart and Elegy for Angels and Dogs by Bob Eggleton

Originally published in December 1990, Tor Double #28 contains the fourth story (but third headlining story) by Kim Stanley Robinson, who first appeared in Tor Double #1, and the second, and final story by Jack Vance.

The Dragon Masters was originally published in Galaxy in August 1962. It was previously published as part of an Ace Double (with Vance’s The Five Gold Bands) by Ace Books in 1963. It won the Hugo Award and the Seiun Award.

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A Halloween Reading List

A Halloween Reading List

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Ace Double #42900: Tower of the Medusa by Lin Carter, and Kar Kaballa by
George H. Smith (Ace Books, November 1969). Cover art by Jeff Jones and John Schoenherr

I’m working on a Halloween entry for the Swords & Planet League, and on a couple of posts about Jack Vance. In the meantime, I thought I’d run a few covers of books I’ve got in the house here but haven’t actually read yet.

First up are three doubles featuring Lin Carter, two from Belmont and one from Ace. The Tower of Medusa is from Ace, with the backing book being Kar Kaballa by George H. Smith. Some reviews call it S&P but a quick scan suggests more Space Opera to me. After I read it, if it’s S&P, I’ll discuss it further. Cover artist is listed as Kelly Freas but I saw someone claim it has a signature reading “Jones” and that it was Jeffrey Jones. This does not look like a Jones to me and I can’t find any signature on my book.

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Tor Doubles #27: Orson Scott Card’s Eye for Eye and Lloyd Biggle, Jr.’s The Tunesmith

Tor Doubles #27: Orson Scott Card’s Eye for Eye and Lloyd Biggle, Jr.’s The Tunesmith

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Cover for The Graveyard Heart and Elegy for Angels and Dogs by Bob Eggleton

Originally published in November 1990. In addition to the stories, Orson Scott Card provided two essays entitled “Foreword: How Lloyd Biggle, Jr., Changed My Life, Part I (The Tunesmith)” and “Afterword: How Lloyd Biggle, Jr., Changed My Life, Part II (The Tunesmith),” both original to this volume.

The Tunesmith was originally published in Worlds of If in August 1957. Erlin Bacue is a composer in a world which has turned a deaf ear to traditional music. The only music that is composed are Coms, short for commercials. What sets Baque apart from his fellow composers is that, while he makes use of the multichord for his compositions, he does all his composing himself, unlike most other composers who make heavy use of what we would now recognize as artificial intelligence. This hive his Coms a depth that others don’t have, but it also means that he takes longer to compose his Coms than other composers do.

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The Heroic Fantasy of C.L. Moore

The Heroic Fantasy of C.L. Moore

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Jirel of Joiry (Ace Books, November 1982). Cover by Stephen Hickman

While Edmond Hamilton introduced me to Space Opera, his wife, Leigh Brackett, and another woman writer, Catherine Lucille Moore (1911 – 1987), showed me the kind of emotional power these stories could wield. Moore was an influence on Brackett, and both of these writers wrote beautiful and poetic prose, which is something I always look for in the books I take home with me, although it’s not something I often find. (Robert E. Howard was another writer who could create that kind of prose, and both Moore and Brackett acknowledged him as an influence.)

Moore is known today for two genres that she did stellar work in. Neither of those is Sword and Planet, but one of them is Sword & Sorcery. Her Jirel of Joiry stories are exotic and luminescent. Jirel is one of the earliest flame-tressed female warriors in fantasy fiction. Depending on how far afield I eventually travel with this series, we may well come back to Jirel.

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