My Lord Barbarian (Del Rey, April 1977). Cover by Boris Vallejo
Andrew J. Offutt (1934 -2013) wrote a lot of books and I’m going to talk about him more as I go along. He wrote several Conan pastiches and a whole series of pastiches about Robert E. Howard’s character Cormac Mac Art. He also wrote porn or near porn in several genres under pseudonyms, which I’ll get around to. He has several S&P novels to his credit. Here’s one.
My Lord Barbarian was billed as a Sword and Planet novel, but it didn’t have much of the feel of such a novel to me. It was indeed set on another planet (several in fact), and the setting is S & P — an artificial solar system created by an advanced human civilization which has fallen into decay. Most worship “Siense” (Science) as a God now.
Cover for Double Meaning and Rule Golden by Wayne Barlow
Originally published in May 1991, Tor Double #34 includes two stories by Damon Knight that had previously appeared together (along with three other stories) in Knight’s 1979 collection Rule Golden and Other Stories, published by Avon. Although listed as Tor Double #34 on the copyright page, this volume was published the month before Tor Double #33, which was discussed last week.
Double Meaningwas originally published in Startling Stories in January 1953. It was reprinted as one half of an Ace Double in 1965, appearing with the Damon Knight collection Off Center. When reprinted as an Ace Double, it was retitled The Rithian Terror. Over the years, it has been reprinted using both titles.
Knight tells the story of Thorne Spangler, an investigator for the intergalactic human empire. Based on Earth in the mid-twenty-sixth century, he is given the task of finding an enemy Rithian who has managed to make it to the home planet. The Rithians are an alien race who can disguise themselves as humans. A group of either were known to have landed on Earth, seven of whom have been killed, but the final one has gone missing.
Double Meaning is a buddy story, of sorts. Spangler is paired up with Jawj Pembun, an investigator from one of the human colonies who has more experience dealing with the Rithians than anybody on Earth. Spangler views Pembun as a hick and an amateur who refuses to investigate following protocol, instead going off on tangents and jumping to conclusions. The fact that Pembun is quickly proven right in most cases, only makes it harder for Spangler to accept the man or his methods. …
Hardwired (Tor Books, June 1986). Cover by Luis Royo
Sci-fi has long been home to nightmarish views of the future as thrilling as they are frightening. The genre simply would not be the same without our post-apocalyptic wastelands.
But for every Handmaid’s Tale there’s a dystopian vision that doesn’t get the appreciation it deserves. Some have certainly sold millions of copies but are more recognized for drama or action as opposed to what they have to say about the challenges facing us tomorrow. Here are several such examples that definitely deserve a bit more love from readers. Not for how epic or cool they are but for the underlying ideas their authors hoped we would absorb.
Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams
Hardwired is rightly celebrated for its contributions to cyberpunk. So much of the verbiage, flare, and aesthetic of the subgenre can be traced back to this relatively short novel. A future where the lines between man and machine are blurred? A ruined Earth? The illicit struggle to survive despite overwhelming odds? It’s all here, the ingredients many a choom would run with over the years.
Aldair in Albion and Aldair, Master of Ships (DAW Books, May 1976 and September 1977). Covers by Josh Kirby
My feature today is what I call an “honorary Sword & Planet series.” The Aldairseries by Neal Barrett, Jr. (1929 – 2014) not only doesn’t have a human hero, but it’s set on Earth.
But it has the feel and charm and adventure that defines S&P fiction. It also has some great covers and illustrations by artists who worked on the Dray Prescot series. DAW did it right in those days. I just love their paperbacks of that time.
As we move into the final month of reviews, there is a significant change in the format of the Tor Doubles. The series began with the proto-Tor Double of Keith Laumer’s The House in November and The Other Sky, but every volume since then has contained stories by two different authors. However, three of the four final published volumes are single author books. This week looks at a volume with two stories by Mike Resnick, next week will be two stories by Damon Knight, and in three weeks, the final published volume contained two stories by Fritz Leiber. This volume was originally published in June 1991, which sharp eyed readers will note skips a month from last week’s volume. That is because Tor Doubles #33 and 34 were published in reverse numerical order, with this one published after the next one.
Bwanawas an originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in January 1990. Between 1988 and 1996, Resnick wrote ten connected stories about the utopian planetoid Kirinyaga, eight of which earned him Hugo nominations, including two winners. Describing the entire series as a “Fable of Utopia,” each story followed a similar pattern.
Mother of Storms (Tor Books, July 1994). Cover by Bob Eggleton
One of science fiction’s subgenres is that novel that emulates the style of bestsellers — bestsellers as they were before the fantastic genres became a big part of the cultural mainstream. Michael Crichton, for one, specialized in this type of writing, from The Andromeda Strain to Jurassic Park; but other writers take it up from time to time: Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in Lucifer’s Hammer, David Brin in Earth, and much more recently Andy Weir in The Martian and Harry Turtledove in Supervolcano.
Some markers are common in this sort of book: reduced use of expository passages, a more demotic prose style, a near future setting that’s easy to imagine, multiple viewpoints and a large cast of characters — and despite this, a much reduced presence of characters who have a detached, scientific view of the world. John Barnes’s Mother of Storms is a classic example of that kind of science fiction.
I Am a Barbarian by Edgar Rice Burrough (Ace Books, September 1975). Cover by Boris Vallejo
The Fantastic Art of Boris Vallejo , which I discussed in my post last week, contains three more paintings that became paperback covers that I own and well remember, although none of these are Sword & Planet covers.
First up we have I Am a Barbarian by Edgar Rice Burroughs, from Ace Books. If you discount his westerns, this is one of only two historical novels ERB wrote, the other being The Outlaw of Torn. Torn is my favorite of ERB’s standalone novels but Barbarian also ranks up there.
Cover for Run for the Stars and Echoes of Thunder by Barclay Shaw
Tor Double number #32 was originally published in April 1991 and includes Echoes of Thunder, an original story, in this form, for the Tor Double line, which, as with the Popkes story a couple volumes earlier, has not been reprinted in this form. This is Dann and Haldeman’s only appearance in the series. It also includes Harlan Ellison’s only appearance in the series.
Run for the Starswas originally published in Science FictionAdventures in June 1957. Ellison has noted this as the author’s preferred edition of the story.
Benno Tallant is a drug addict on war torn Deald’s World. While ransacking the corpse of a grocer for money with which to buy drugs, he is taken prisoner by three men who need his assistance in their attempt to keep Earth safe from invasion of the alien Kyban, whose fleet is preparing to destroy the human outpost on Deald’s World.
The Children of Llyr (Ballantine Adult Fantasy #33, August 1971). Cover by David Johnston
This latest entry in my series of essays about mostly obscure SF and Fantasy from the ’70s and ’80s looks at a novel published in one of the most celebrated publishing series of the early ’70s. This was the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, which ran from 1969 to 1974, under the editorship of Betty Ballantine, with the assistance of “Editorial Consultant” Lin Carter.
I’ve discussed Carter’s work before, and I subscribe to the more or less standard view that he was not a very good writer of fiction, but that his contributions to the field as an editor (or “consultant”) were tremendous. And nowhere more so than in this series of books — though Ballantine’s oversight was also important.
The first volume was The Blue Star, by Fletcher Pratt, a reprint of a 1952 novel. The final official Ballantine Adult Fantasy publication was #65, Over the Hills and Far Away, by Lord Dunsany.
Cover for The Alien Way and Naked to the Stars by Brian Waugh
Tor Double #31 was originally published in April 1991. The proto-Tor Double, which included two stories by Keith Laumer, was the only volume up to this point to include content from a single author. This volume, with two stories by Gordon R. Dickson, is the first official Tor Double to include content from only one author. However, of the remaining five Tor Doubles, four of them would prove to be single author collections.
Naked to the Stars was an originally serialized in F&SF in October and November 1961. Although the story begins as a fairly typical piece of military science fiction, Dickson takes it into a different direction, which makes the story stand out.
