G.W. Thomas on Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers

G.W. Thomas on Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers

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Three collections in Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker Saga: Berserker, Brother Assassin, and The Ultimate Enemy
(Ace Books, September 1978, December 1978, and September 1979). Covers: Boris Vallejo and Michael Whelan

Ace SF blogger G.W. Thomas, working atop a demon-haunted tower in Alberta, has been digging deep into a lot of my favorite old SF paperbacks, including C. L. Moore & Henry Kuttner’s Earth’s Last Citadel, Murray Leinster’s Get Off My World!, and Space Operas You May Have Missed.

But I think my favorite recent piece was his two-part series on a writer who’s largely forgotten today: Fred Saberhagen, author of The Book of Swords, Empire of the East, and The Dracula Tape, and his most enduring creation: the galaxy-roving Berserkers. which appeared in some seventeen volumes.

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Robert Adams was a Master of Narrative Drive

Robert Adams was a Master of Narrative Drive

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The first ten novels in the Horseclans series by Robert Adams (Signet/
New American Library editions, 1979-1983). Cover art by Ken Kelly

Franklin Robert Adams (1933 – 1990) only used his middle and last name on his books. He wrote twenty-six of them, in three different series, and edited nearly a dozen more.

His first and most famous series is called Horseclans. It’s set on a post-apocalyptic Earth, after a nuclear war, and begins on America’s great plains with tribal groups organized along Native American lines. Later, it moves toward a more feudal society with city states and knights in armor. There’s a fairly elaborate back story about how the modern societies were built from the remnants of American survivors and some of the invaders.

The first book was called The Coming of the Horseclans and published in 1975. The last one published was #18, The Clan of the Cats, and it appeared in 1988, two years before Adams’ death. The series may be post-apocalyptic, but it’s long after Earth’s recovery has begun so it really feels more like standard Sword & Sorcery. There is some magic with undying heroes, telepathy, and “Witch” men. It’s definitely not Sword & Planet but most folks who like S&P like these pretty well.

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Gary Gygax’s 17 Steps to Role-Playing Mastery (Steps 1 to 5)

Gary Gygax’s 17 Steps to Role-Playing Mastery (Steps 1 to 5)

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Role Playing Mastery by Gary Gygax (Perigee Trade, August 3, 1987)

My Dungeons and Dragons roots don’t go back to the very beginning, but I didn’t miss it by much. I remember going to our Friendly Local Gaming Store with my buddy. He would buy a shiny TSR module and I would get a cool Judges Guild supplement.

And I remember how D&D was the center of the RPG world in those pre-PC/video game playing days. And Gary Gygax was IT. It all centered around him. So, I read with interest a book that he put out in 1987, less than twelve months after he had severed all ties with TSR.

Role Playing Mastery is his very serious look at RPGing. He included the 17 steps he identified to becoming a Role Playing Master.

If you’re reading this post, you probably know that Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson co-created Dungeons and Dragons circa 1973-1974. Unfortunately, it was not a long-lasting partnership and lawsuits would ensue. While both were instrumental in creating D&D, it is Gygax who is remembered as the Father of Role Playing.

In 1987, Gary Gygax put out a book entitled Role-Playing Mastery, which gave guidelines on how to excel as a player in role-playing games. At that time, there were essentially two versions of Dungeons and Dragons. The Original, or ‘Basic’ game, had evolved under Tom Moldvay’s rules development.

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Folk Horror edited by Paul Kane & Marie O’Reagan

Folk Horror edited by Paul Kane & Marie O’Reagan

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Folk Horror (Flame Tree Publishing, August 27, 2024)

Folk Horror is one of those terms that’s never quite fashionable or unfashionable.

To me there’s only either good or bad horror fiction, and that’s what really matters to the readers.

This anthology — part of the Beyond & Within series from Flame Tree Publishing — fortunately is very good, regardless of labels. So kudos to the editors (excellent horror writers themselves) for assembling such an amount of creepy and entertaining material.

To be precise the book includes two little poems and fifteen stories.

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Conan Unchained!, The Keep on the Borderlands, and the 50th Anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons

Conan Unchained!, The Keep on the Borderlands, and the 50th Anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons

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Advanced Dungeons & Dragons CB1: Conan Unchained! by David “Zeb” Cook (TSR, 1984)

Before TSR created the Conan Role Playing Game with its own rules and conventions, they released two Conan adventure modules for use with AD&D, but with a few interesting rules additions, including Fear Checks, Luck Points, and more lenient Healing rules.

This adventure was written by the legendary David “Zeb” Cook and illustrated by the incredibly talented Jeff Butler. As I’ve had the pleasure of meeting both gentlemen at several conventions, I managed to get the book signed and personalized by each of them. It would be epic if I could get Arnold to sign it. 😉

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A to Z Review: “The Sin-Eater’s Tale,” by Brennan Wysong

A to Z Review: “The Sin-Eater’s Tale,” by Brennan Wysong

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A to Z Reviews
A to Z Review

Brennan Wysong’s “The Sin-Eater’s Tale”  opens with the introduction of the sin-eater in the post-Civil War  south.  The  sin-eater’s task is to go around to the funerals of the boys whose bodies have been returned home after their deaths and force people to confront the evils that their sons and brothers and friends had done. Once all the sins were enumerated and the sin-eater wrote them down, he would charge the family and eat the paper, thereby giving the family closure and providing absolution to the dead for the evils they committed during their lives.

Reading the story, the sin-eater is, in some ways reminiscent of the role Orson Scott Card provided Ender Wiggin in Speaker for the Dead, a way of summing up a person’s life, warts and all, although Wysong’s sin-eater also offers a means of expiation for the dead. Once the sin-eater is paid and the sins are swallowed  , the family and friends can pretend the cruelties and crimes of the dead no longer exist.

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Gothic Noir: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Gothic Noir: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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The Shadow of the Wind (Penguin Books, February 1, 2005). Cover by Tal Goretsky

Shadow of the Wind is the English rendering of  La sombra del viento, the 2001 novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and the first (though a standalone story sans cliffhangers) in his five book Cemetery of Forgotten Books series, translated by Lucia Graves (a serendipitously appropriate last name and, as it happens, the daughter of poet and historical novelist Robert Graves, he of I Claudius and The White Goddess fame). I hope this is a literal translation as Shadow of the Wind perfectly captures the story’s gothic and noirish essence. We can’t actually see wind, nor does wind cast a shadow; rather we feel the wind, detecting by inference the sometimes destructive aftereffects of high winds. Or, to paraphrase as someone else famously put it, the allegory is blowing in the wind.

The titular Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a somewhat fantastical labyrinth repository of rare books. Unlike Julia Alvarez’s Cemetery of Untold Stories, where texts are buried and talk to one another in their afterlife, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books could be some idiosyncratic bookshop with obsessively weird stock accessible only to certain people, which is not that all different from certain kinds of booksellers.

But the touch of fantasy  is when our hero, Daniel Sempere, taken to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books by his bookshop owning father, is tasked to select one volume, and one volume only, he feels drawn to from among a complex maze of shelvings. That book is Shadows of the Wind  by Julian Carax, and, yes, we’re getting metafictional here. What kicks the plot off is that there are no other surviving copies of the work, Carax’s output having been destroyed in a warehouse fire of mysterious origins.

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Taking in the Trash: Paul Cantor’s Pop Culture Trilogy

Taking in the Trash: Paul Cantor’s Pop Culture Trilogy

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Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, November 28, 2001)

Having just finished a very lively and thought-provoking book, I did something I almost never do — I decided to write the author a fan letter. Naturally, I hopped on Google to get his contact information, only to discover that he died almost three years ago, in February of 2022. Why do these things always happen to me?

The book I just finished, Pop Culture and the Dark Side of the American Dream: Con Men, Gangsters, Drug Lords, and Zombies was published in 2019, and is the third book in a loose cultural criticism trilogy written by Paul A. Cantor, a well-known Shakespearian scholar (Shakespeare and Rome: Republic and Empire) who was for many years a professor of English at the University of Virginia. The other volumes in the “trilogy” are Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (2001) and The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV (2012).

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Maybe I Am Romantic

Maybe I Am Romantic

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I love them.

Good afterevenmorn (whenever you happen to be reading this), Readers!

I’m still on a Chinese costume drama kick. It has been my crutch when dealing with the terribleness of the world of late. I don’t know why, but there we have it. Everyone who knows me is sick to death of me proclaiming my love for The Untamed, which remains the golden standard for serialised Chinese costume dramas for me. Since then, and since I last mentioned it here, I’ve watched a number of them (when I tell you I’ve spent the majority of my time rotting on the couch watching unfairly beautiful people swan about in obscenely beautiful clothing, I mean it). Some were silly. Most of them were entertaining. One in particular I have added to my ‘would really like to own on DVD/BluRay’ list. It has a dumb as hell title (Wonderland of Love. Had I not seen a short of one of the battle scenes in the series on YouTube, I would not have watched it at all based on that title), but was a great story. I did a review of it on my personal blog.
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What I’ve Been Listening To: November 2024

What I’ve Been Listening To: November 2024

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So, I did not update you last month, on what I’ve been listening to most recently. Let me tell you, the FLOOD of emails and comments, wanting to know what’s been running through my Audible, was deafening. Wait. No. I mean, deathly silent.

MISTLETOE MURDERS 3

I like Hallmark Christmas movies. They’re all similar, but they’re enjoyable. My ex-wife and I even got our son to kind of enjoy them. He would laugh at the tropes when they occurred, like the snowball fight, the misunderstanding, the plot twist at 90 minutes EVERY time.

Sometimes I watch the Hallmark Mystery movies, and the general ones. Mistletoe Murders is an Audible Original series, included with my membership level. On its third season. This radio show about a gift shop owner is like a Hallmark Mystery Christmas series. But with more emphasis on the mystery side, than the ‘sappy/silly’ Christmas side. She has a past that makes her far more than just a store owner.

Seasons have varied in number of episodes and length, running about an hour and-a-half first time out, and between four and four and-half-hours in the next two seasons.

If you like Hallmark Mysteries (which I wrote about here long ago), this wont’ do much for you. If you do like them, then this is pure bonus for your Hallmark-loving heart.

Just a few weeks ago, the first season of a streaming series started on Hallmark+. I don’t have that channel, so I haven’t seen it. But I think it’s cool they took the audio series and put it on screen. I hope to catch it soon.

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