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Category: Vintage Treasures

Chess in Sword & Planet Fiction, Part II: Dray Prescot and Gor

Chess in Sword & Planet Fiction, Part II: Dray Prescot and Gor

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Dray Prescot 20: A Sword for Kregen (DAW, August 1979) and Players of Gor
(DAW Books, March 1984). Covers by Richard Hescox and Ken Kelly

My second exposure to Sword & Planet chess came in one of my favorite Sword & Planet books, which I’ve mentioned in this series already a couple of times. This was A Sword for Kregen, by Alan Burt Akers (aka Ken Bulmer). In this book, Dray Prescot, our earthman hero, becomes a living Jikaida piece in a battle to the death.

Jikaida is war game similar to chess, although considerably more complicated. There are several different variations played across the world of Kregen. It’s usually played on a board of much more than 100 squares of either black and white or blue and yellow. There are typically 36 pieces to a side, arranged in three ranks. I never tried to play Jikaida, though the rules are available. Here’s a link to an online description of the game.

John Norman also introduced an S&P version of chess in his Gor series. He called it Kaissa, which is clearly a nod to the Goddess of chess — Caissa — who first appeared in a 1527 poem by Hieronymus Vida telling the story of a chess game between the Gods Apollo and Mercury.

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Chess in Sword & Planet Fiction: The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Chess in Sword & Planet Fiction: The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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The Chessmen of Mars (Ace Books, December 1962). Cover by Roy Krenkel, Jr.

Chess in Sword & Planet fiction: I learned the basic rules of chess in grade school and liked that it was a game that didn’t require luck. I didn’t do well at “luck!” The first adult I played was my brother-in-law, who rather gleefully mopped the floor with me. Out of resentment, I began to study and in our next game, probably when I was about 16, I mopped the floor with him.

I played quite a bit in college and actually joined a chess club in graduate school and began to study the game seriously. I got close to “expert” level, still well below Master level, before realizing I had to quit serious chess if I were going to be able to do my graduate work. Both were very time consuming and chess wasn’t going to pay the bills so it had to go bye bye.

I bring the game up here because I remember with distinct pleasure discovering Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Chessmen of Mars. Wow! A whole book in which a chess-like game plays a major role, and where living chess pieces must fight for the control of squares during the game. I know this isn’t the first time someone used the concept of living chess pieces but it was my first exposure to it. It sent my imagination soaring.

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Tarzan and Beyond: Philip Jose Farmer, Part II

Tarzan and Beyond: Philip Jose Farmer, Part II

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Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (Playboy
Paperbacks, August 1981 and July 1981). Covers: uncredited, Ken Barr

Read the first half of this article, The World of Tiers and Beyond: Philip Jose Farmer, Part I.

Continuing our examination of Farmer’s pastiches, Farmer soon gave up the Grandrith and Caliban names and went full on with the characters in two fictional biographies called Tarzan Alive (1972) and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973), both from Playboy’s Science Fiction line.

The cover for Tarzan Alive is very cool but is uncredited. Ken Barr seems to have done the Doc Savage cover and it’s also very cool. I liked both of these books pretty well. The Tarzan book rambles a bit. The Doc Savage is better than many of the original Doc Savage novels. It references quite a few. These books are true to the characters and have none of the bizarre sexual exploits described in A Feast Unknown.

These books also suggest that Tarzan, Doc Savage, and such other fictional characters as Sherlock Holmes are all related to each other and are the product of inherited mutations caused by a meteor that struck England in 1795 called either the Wold Cottage or the Wold Newton Meteor.

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Some Remarks on an Unremarkable Space Opera: Galactic Gambit by Roy C. Dudley

Some Remarks on an Unremarkable Space Opera: Galactic Gambit by Roy C. Dudley

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Galactic Gambit (Lenox Hill Press, September 1971). Cover by Herbstman

In my recent looks at less-remembered novels of the ’70s and ’80s I’ve covered some obscurish works by well-remembered writers (Phyllis Eisenstein, L. Sprague de Camp) and some obscurish works by less well known but hardly unknown writers (Gerard Klein, Mick Farren), and even some quite little known writers (Atanielle Annyn Noel).

But this time I’m trying for something truly obscure — a hardcover from 1971 that is the only novel by its writer, from a publishing company that offered microscopic advances ($300) and sold only to libraries. The only semblance of a review of this novel I could find is in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia (of course!) and it reads in full: “US printing technician and author of Galactic Gambit (1971), an unremarkable Space Opera.”

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The World of Tiers and Beyond: Philip Jose Farmer, Part I

The World of Tiers and Beyond: Philip Jose Farmer, Part I

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The World of Tiers, Volumes 1 and 2 (Science Fiction Book Club, November 1981). Covers by Boris Vallejo

Philip Jose Farmer (1918 – 2009). Farmer was a versatile writer. I discovered him from his Sword & Planet work with his World of Tiers series, but went on to read a lot of other books by him, including some pastiches he wrote in ERB’s universe. I’ll be discussing him here in two posts.

My introduction to Farmer came through the Science Fiction Book Club. They offered the first five books in The World of Tiers in a two-volume set, and I still have mine (shown here, with covers by Boris Vallejo.) I read them straight through and looked for more. There weren’t any. Not at the time. Years later, another book (More than Fire) was published, but I haven’t read it. I did read a connected book called Red Orc’s Rage.

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The End of Time and Me: Michael Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time

The End of Time and Me: Michael Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time

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The Dancers at the End of Time trilogy: An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands,
and The End of All Songs (Avon Books, September and November 1977,
and June 1978). Cover art by Stanislaw Fernandes

When I discovered Moorcock in the early 1980s, I read his trilogy Dancers at the End of Time and the associated novel A Messiah at the End of Time. I remember enjoying the trilogy, though I have only vague memories of the stand-alone novel. Back in 2017, I re-read Moorcock’s Elric series and wrote about it for Black Gate. In 2020, I did the same for his Corum novels and in 2022, I revisited Erekose. Rather than look at Hawkmoon, which I last re-read in 2010, I decided to dive into The End of Time sequence.

In addition to The Dancers at the End of Time trilogy and the novel The Transformation of Miss Mavis Ming (also published as Messiah at the End of Time and Constant Fire), Moorcock has written several short stories that belong to the sequence: “Pale Roses,” “White Stars,” “Ancient Shadows,” “Elric at the End of Time,” and “Sumptuous Dress: A Question of Size at the End of Time.” Although most were published before I read the trilogy, I believe I missed all of them with the exception of “Elric at the End of Time.”

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The Tuvela Theory: The Demon Breed by James H. Schmitz

The Tuvela Theory: The Demon Breed by James H. Schmitz

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The Demon Breed (Ace Books, September 1979). Cover by Bob Adragna

Earlier this year, I visited my city library during a book sale. One of the things I spotted on their shelves was a novel by James H. Schmitz that I wasn’t familiar with. I’ve liked Schmitz since I discovered his story “Novice” in the collection Analog 2 — so I bought this one.

The Demon Breed came out in 1968, fairly late in Schmitz’s career, which lasted from 1943 to 1974. Like a large part of his work, it first appeared in Analog, where it was serialized as The Tuvela. Most of what he wrote was short fiction, including his best known story, “The Witches of Karres,” expanded into a novel with the same title in 1966; The Demon Breed is one of only four novels, and by today’s standards, a fairly short one.

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Vintage Treasures: The Doom That Came to Sarnath by H.P. Lovecraft

Vintage Treasures: The Doom That Came to Sarnath by H.P. Lovecraft

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The Doom That Came to Sarnath (Ballantine Books, November 1976). Cover by Murray Tinkelman

H.P. Lovecraft, creator of the Cthulhu Mythos, was one of the greatest horror writers of the 20th Century. But horror wasn’t all he produced, as editor Lin Carter adroitly pointed out in the introduction to The Doom That Came to Sarnath.

Those readers who know only the Cthulhu Mythos stories, know only a single side of Lovecraft… the Cthulhu Mythos, while completely his own invention, was constructed along the guidelines established by earlier writers whom he greatly admired… But far beyond his borrowing of basic techniques from Machen and Chambers, Lovecraft is more deeply indebted to the great Anglo-Irish fantasist, Lord Dunsany… not content to make up his own geography, Dunsany invented the religion to which his imaginary worlds paid worship. An extremely clever, even brilliant, idea, and one which has been used by many writers after him. Lovecraft used this theme as the basis for his own Cthulhu Mythos.

As a young reader, Lovecraft was enthralled by Dunsany’s superb fiction. Many of his earliest tales… are Dunsanian in texture and color… Last year I edited a volume of the most Dunsanian of these tales, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath… I would have liked to have included all the fiction from Lovecraft’s “Dunsanian period” in that single book, but the size of the volume would have been impractical. Hence, this second collection.

The Doom That Came to Sarnath contains 14 stories and poems from early in Lovecraft’s career (1919-1925), plus half a dozen later tales, including his famous collaboration with Harry Houdini, “Imprisoned With the Pharaohs.” Although many of the tales — including the title story — are deliciously macabre, there’s very little horror here. It is, as Lin Carter promised, a surprise and delight for those who know Lovecraft only as a horror writer.
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A Patroller for a Vanished Federation: In the Hands of Glory by Phyllis Eisenstein

A Patroller for a Vanished Federation: In the Hands of Glory by Phyllis Eisenstein

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In the Hands of Glory (Timescape/Pocket Books, November 1981). Cover by Rowena Morrill

Here’s my new look at an SF paperback from the ’70s/’80s. Phyllis Eisenstein’s In the Hands of Glory is a book I eagerly bought and read back when it came out, in 1981. By a writer whose work I enjoyed. From a publishing imprint (Timescape, edited by David Hartwell) that I greatly respected. (Not to mention the Rowena Morrill cover which, let’s just say, overtly exaggerates certain physical characteristics of the protagonist relative to her actual depiction in the book.) And I had fond, but very dim, memories of the book. So I reread it.

Phyllis Eisenstein (1946-2020) was a Chicago writer. Black Gate is a Chicago-based ‘zine, and I’m originally from the Chicago area myself, and over the years I got to know Phyllis and her husband (and sometime collaborator) Alex fairly well, from meeting them at any number of conventions. Indeed, at this year’s Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention, I had a long conversation with Alex which touched on their time in Germany (Alex was in the military then) during which Phyllis drafted her first novel.

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In the tradition of Conan: The Kyrik and Kothar Novels by Gardner F. Fox

In the tradition of Conan: The Kyrik and Kothar Novels by Gardner F. Fox

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The Kyrik novels by Gardner F. Fox (Leisure Books, 1975-1976)

I’m getting ready to embark on a series of posts about Philip Jose Farmer, but got distracted looking through my shelves and decided to throw in a post about the Sword & Sorcery work of Gardner F. Fox, who I mentioned here a while back for his two book S&P series set on the planet Llarn.

While my small hometown library didn’t have anything by Robert E. Howard, they had various books claiming to be “In the tradition of Conan.” That’s how I found out about Howard. The first “In the tradition” book I read was Kyrik: Warlock Warrior by Fox, from Leisure Books, 1975. The cover was candy to a starving teen. By Ken Barr (although I didn’t know it at the time), the cover showed a muscled barbarian swordsman astride a pterodactyl with a nearly naked green-haired beauty beside him. My imagination ignited. And when I started reading it, I loved it even more.

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