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Category: Vintage Treasures

A Science Fiction Film Noir: Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

A Science Fiction Film Noir: Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

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Lord of Light (Avon Books, January 1969). Cover by Ronald Walotsky

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god.

Roger Zelazny was considered to be one of the major New Wave writers of the 1960s. But where many of those writers found inspiration in naturalism, modernism, or even surrealism, much of Zelazny’s work was inspired by mythology, somewhat in the style of poets such as Yeats or Eliot.

Early novels in this mode included The Dream Master (expanded from the novella “He Who Shapes”), This Immortal (originally titled And Call Me Conrad, which I think is a much better choice), and Lord of Light, which I’ve long considered his single greatest literary achievement.

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David C. Smith, Part Three: Oron and the Tales of Attluma

David C. Smith, Part Three: Oron and the Tales of Attluma

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The Oron series by David C Smith

Although David Smith’s work in the Robert E. Howard Universe is memorable, his best creations to me are his original stories of Attluma.

Attluma is an island continent that evokes the spirit of Atlantis. Smith himself drew a map of the continent that appeared in the first published book in the series. Shown below. This book, simply called Oron, was also my first exposure to the world of Attluma. Five books in this series came out from Zebra between 1980 and 1983.

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A Gender Fluid Future on the Moon: John Varley’s Steel Beach

A Gender Fluid Future on the Moon: John Varley’s Steel Beach

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Steel Beach (Ace Books, August 1993). Cover by Todd Cameron Hamilton

My hot take for 2026: books are ephemeral.

Old news, perhaps, but did any spec-fic writer know this better than John Varley?  In 1992’s Steel Beach, he positively revels in his own unimportance while offering blistering, adroit editorials on everything from indolence to anatomy. But who remembers this book today? And how many remember the name John Varley?

I first encountered Varley’s Nebula-winning short, “The Persistence of Vision,” on a 1988 cross-country camping trip. The Terry Carr-edited Best Science Fiction Novellas of the Year #1 was and is chock-full of good material, but it was Varley’s story that haunted me, in part because it tacitly asks readers whether they would put out their own eyes for love – and I must confess that I didn’t like the question, much less my reflexive, fully sighted answer.

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Severed Arms and the Angel of Death: The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XV edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Severed Arms and the Angel of Death: The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XV edited by Karl Edward Wagner

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The Year’s Best Horror Stories XV (DAW Books, October 1987). Cover by Michael Whelan

It’s been awhile, but given a nudge from John O’Neill I’m back with the ongoing perusal of DAW’s Year’s Best Horror series.

The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XV was the fifteenth in the lineup and the seventh volume edited by the great Karl Edward Wagner (d. 1994). This book was copyrighted and printed in 1987 and represents the best short horror in the field for 1986. Michael Whelan’s art appears for the twelfth time as a cover for the series. Whelan’s art here depicts a gruesome scene of a severed, but wrapped, human arm in the meat drawer of a refrigerator. A sign of horror trends in the mid- to late 1980s?

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From Woking to Ansby: The High Crusade by Poul Anderson

From Woking to Ansby: The High Crusade by Poul Anderson

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The High Crusade (Berkley Books, October 1983). Cover by Tom Kidd

The High Crusade is one of the earlier novels in Poul Anderson’s long career: serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in the summer of 1960 (just as it was changing its title to Analog), published in book form that same year, and nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1961, though it lost to A Canticle for Leibowitz. It remained popular and is still in print. In a lot of ways the story is a romp, but it also has themes that Anderson returned to more seriously in later books.

The High Crusade starts out as an alien invasion story, of a form going back to H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds: A spacecraft lands in England, and mysterious beings emerge from it, wielding advanced weapons and killing people to show their power. We have the same contrast between human and alien military technologies. But in this story, Anderson plays a trick he loved to do, especially early in his career (in stories such as “Journeys End” and “The Man Who Came Early”): he reverses the expected outcome from earlier stories.

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David C. Smith & Robert E. Howard, Part Two: Red Sonja

David C. Smith & Robert E. Howard, Part Two: Red Sonja

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Red Sonja by David C. Smith and Richard L. Tierney (Ace Books, December 1981 – May 1983). Covers by Boris Vallejo

In addition to his Black Vulmea and Bran Mak Morn stories, David C. Smith collaborated with Richard L. Tierney (1936 –2022) on six novels in a series about Red Sonja. Though often described as Robert E. Howard pastiches, that label is not completely accurate. Red Sonja (spelled with a J), is not a Howard character, although she is based on a couple of female swordslingers Howard did create, particularly — it seems to me — on Valeria, from the Conan story “Red Nails.” (A very similar character named Valeria appeared in the first Conan movie — Conan the Barbarian.)

Howard did create a character named Red Sonya (spelled with a “y”), who appeared as a secondary character in one historical tale — “The Shadow of the Vulture,” from the collection Sowers of the Thunder. She had red hair instead of blonde like Valeria, but otherwise is less reminiscent of Red Sonja than is Valeria.

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David C. Smith & Robert E. Howard, Part One

David C. Smith & Robert E. Howard, Part One

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For the Witch of the Mists by David C. Smith & Richard Tierney (Zebra, January 1978) and The Witch of the Indies by David C. Smith (Zebra, June 1977). Covers by Doug Beekman and Stephen Fabian

I consider David C. Smith (1952) a friend. We’ve never met face to face but we’ve corresponded and have spoken on the phone. As with writers such as Karl Edward Wagner and Andy Offutt, I first became aware of David as an author through a connection to Robert E. Howard.

While in REHupa, the Robert E. Howard United Press Association, I routinely did reviews of Howard pastiches. And so I came upon The Witch of the Indies (Zebra, 1977, cover by Stephen Fabian). Shortly after I picked up For the Witch of the Mists by Smith & Richard Tierney (Zebra, 1978, Cover by Doug Beekman).

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A Tragedy and a Comedy: Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers

A Tragedy and a Comedy: Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers

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Murder Must Advertise (Pocket Books, 1940)

Mr. Tallboy’s eyes, roving negligently round, had fallen on Bredon’s index-card… Neatly printed on the card stood one word.

DEATH

In Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy Sayers takes murder mysteries in another new direction: not, this time, exploring an established subgenre, but hybridizing the mystery genre with what we would now call workplace drama, or sometimes workplace comedy. The setting is Pym’s Publicity, a successful advertising firm. Many incidents turn on problems in carrying out the work, friendships and tensions between staff members, and relationships with clients.

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The Epic Science Fiction & Fantasy of Poul Anderson, Part Four: The High Crusade, Three Hearts and Three Lions, and The Queen of Air and Darkness

The Epic Science Fiction & Fantasy of Poul Anderson, Part Four: The High Crusade, Three Hearts and Three Lions, and The Queen of Air and Darkness

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The High Crusade (Berkley Medallion, March 1978). Cover artist unknown

Two other good novels by Anderson are The High Crusade (SF), a humorous look at 14th Century humans getting loose in the universe with a captured spaceship, and Three Hearts and Three Lions (Fantasy), which follows a modern (1950s) Earthman who is cast onto a parallel Earth where fantasy and magic are real.

The High Crusade (Doubleday  1960) was first published in three parts in John Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction, July – September 1960. It starts when an alien spaceship lands in England in 1345 just as an English army is being formed to fight in France. The ship belongs to the Wersgorix, who have conquered many planets. This time their plans go awry and the English capture the ship. And now they’re about to take the war to the aliens. My copy is Berkley, 1978, with the cover artist uncredited (see above).

Three Hearts and Three Lions would be categorized as “High Fantasy” and was first published serially in 1953 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was published in book form in 1961. My copy is Berkley, 1978 with a cover by Wayne Barlowe (see below, midway down).

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A Heaven of Action: Mistress of Mistresses by E.R. Eddison

A Heaven of Action: Mistress of Mistresses by E.R. Eddison

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Mistress of Mistresses (Ballantine Books, August 1967). Cover by Barbara Remington

I heard her say, faint as the breath of nightflowers under the stars,

“The fabled land of Zimiamvia. Is it true, will you think, which poets tell us of that fortunate land: that no mortal foot may tread it, but the blessed souls do inhabit it of the dead that be departed: of them that were great upon earth and did great deeds while they were living, that scorned not earth and the delights and the glories of earth, and yet did justly and were not dastards nor yet oppressors?”

 Very shortly after the paperback publication of The Lord of the Rings made it a best seller, Ballantine Books began treating publishing other paperback fantasy novels, turning fantasy into a genre. Some of these were by contemporary authors, such as Joy Chant, Katherine Kurtz, or Evangeline Walton; but many more were older works being brought back into print. Among these older works was E.R. Eddison’s Mistress of Mistresses, first published in 1935.

Eddison had begun writing fantasy in 1922 with The Worm Ourobouros, which Ballantine also republished, a little earlier. In fact they treated them as two volumes of a series. There is indeed a minor linkage between them: The Worm Ourobouros begins by introducing a viewpoint character named Lessingham, who has a dream in which his consciousness is transported to Mercury and witnesses the events of the novel proper, though he doesn’t take part in them and soon enough is no longer mentioned even as a witness.

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