Fred M. Barclay had a story to tell, “The Troglodytes,” and he told it. Apparently, he said everything he had to say, because there is no indication that he ever published anything else. In Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years, Everett E. Bleiler’s biographical note on Barclay states, “No information.”
Barclay uses a framing technique that was relatively common at the time. His narrator, Joe Everett, is found disheveled by a family on a country road and when they take him in to make sure he is okay, he tells them the story of his adventure, which began with Joe and two of his friends, John and Jim. The three men found a cave and decided to explore it, discovering an ancient civilization living underground and completely divorced from the surface world.
It is clear from the start that John and Jim did not return to the surface world with Joe and the main tension is the story is what happened to them. An initial expectation that they were killed by the troglodytic race known as the Ampu appears to be subverted once the trio meets them. The Ampu are welcoming to them and treat them well, giving them a tour of their subterranean world, almost as if they were honored guests.
MichaelHarrington is a writer and course designer living in the Fort Collins Colorado area of the United States. Here we post Michael Harrington’s interview of OliverBrackenbury who is an author, screenwriter, podcaster, and now a magazine editor. In fact, this interview highlights the release of Brackenbury’s new magazine New Edge Sword and Sorcery Magazine (released Sept. 30th, 2022. Hardcover $11.99usd, softcover $3.99usd, and the ePub free)!
Read on to learn more about Oliver Brackenbury, his blog, and New Edge!
Too Many Magicians, Murder and Magic and Lord Darcy Investigates
(Ace, 1979 – 1981). Cover art by Robert Adragna
In 1977 Jim Baen accepted an offer from publisher Tom Doherty to return to Ace Books to head their science fiction line. Doherty left Ace to found Tor Books in 1980 and Baen soon followed him, but his years at Ace were extraordinarily productive. He resurrected an enormous amount of classic SF and fantasy from the magazines and brought it to a brand new audience, including Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Poul Anderson’s Flandry, Keith Laumer’s Retief, Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker, H. Beam Piper’s Fuzzynovels, and collections by Robert Sheckley, James Tiptree, Jr, Robert E. Howard, James H. Schmitz, Barry N. Malzberg, and countless others.
One of the most distinctive works Baen championed was Randall Garrett’s tales of occult detective Lord Darcy, set in an alternate England in which the laws of Magic are rigorously codified, but the laws of physics remain unknown. He gathered them into three volumes: the novel Too Many Magicians and the collections Murder and Magic and Lord Darcy Investigates. They captured a brand new readership, and the books have been reprinted half a dozen times in subsequent decades.
Servants of War by Larry Correia and Steve Diamond (Baen Books, 2022. 424pages). Cover art by Alan Pollack
Veteran fantasy readers may yawn if they hear about an epic fantasy about a farm boy in a remote village rising to power, and the first few pages of Servants of War dangles that trope before readers. And then horror rushes in like a tidal wave, and before Chapter 1 can end, the worn trope is burning with hellfire billowing alchemical smoke, a Grimdark spirit rises out of the book to slap the reader in the face, crank the head back, and pour gasoline-action down a thirsty throat.
Welcome to Servants of War. The combination of military-fantasy veteran Larry Correria with horror-guru Steve Diamond promises “military fantasy with horror” and you’ll get trenches full of that. Baen released this masterpiece that opens The Age of Ravens series in hardcover and audiobook in March 2022; the paperback is due February 2023. Without spoiling, this post covers a summary, excerpts, and a small hint as to the forthcoming sequel. …
My Nord Guardian, who uses a bow and has a kick-butt bear to handle the melee.
I never jumped full-bore into the MMO world. I preferred CRPGs, like Dark Sun, Baldur’s Gate, and Neverwinter Nights. I gave Pathfinder: Kingmaker a long try (gets bogged down in the details – like food management). And the first two Mount and Blades ate up a lot of time.
I did Guild Wars 2, and Rift, short trials. Lord of the Rings Online and Neverwinter Nights have both gotten a fair amount of play, though the Turbine Engine is definitely dated. I love the lore in LotRO.
Age of Conan was my favorite MMO until last year. I like the graphics, and once I got used to the fighting system, it worked. The Conan lore is TERRIFIC. And since I’m a huge Robert E. Howard fan, the setting was my favorite (even more than Middle Earth). I’ve played several characters and classes, and they all were fun. Since I usually solo, the paucity of players wasn’t a problem. (Age of Conan doesn’t even come up on MMO’s ‘Active Player Count List, which goes down to number 63: 8,163. Not many folks around, if that matters to you.)
I played a ton of Morrowind when it came out, and was a big fan. But I didn’t go on to Skyrim, or Oblivion. Just wasn’t interested. I had picked up Elder Scrolls Online during a Steam sale, and made a half-hearted attempt at it a couple years ago. It looked nice, and it was fine. But I wasn’t invested in the world, and Age of Conan remained my go-to MMO.
Last year I did a deep play with a Kajiit Nightblade/Rogue and LOVED it. And I reinstalled it late this summer and I’m rolling through it with a Nord Guardian, using a bow and a bear. ESO is an amazing MMO. The visuals are still great. It’s a beautiful game. The combat system is easy to use, and the skill trees underlying it give lots of options on how you want to build your character.
The lore of Tamriel is simply staggering. The depth is immense. There are books all over the game that you can read (or not) and add to the reality and the history of the setting. There are collectible lore books (there’s a quest) that go in your Lore Library, and you can read them any time. And they don’t take up inventory slots! Not all books are collectible. There are over 1,000 readable books! That is cool.
I love spooky, Halloween fun, type films, especially those with ghosts and haunted houses. I watch them all year long, but there’s something special about watching them in October. I’m not keen on gory, dead teenagers, blood-fest flicks. There’s no amount of money in the world that would entice me to watch the Sawfranchise, no matter how well written, acted, and edited. I’m not putting them down; they’re just not for me. Which means that come October, I’m more likely to look to Disney than Netflix for viewing ideas.
I recently re-watched The Haunted Mansion. My only previous viewing was when it came out in theaters in 2003.
Promotional copy for the movie says,
Here’s the fright-filled comedy adventure loaded with hair-raising laughs and eye-popping special effects! Eddie Murphy stars as a real estate agent whose family comes face-to-face with 999 grim, grinning ghosts in the creepy old Gracey Manor!
I don’t know if there are actually 999 ghosts in the film, but there are a lot. They hit the whole range of emotions, including the silly barbershop quartet singing graveyard busts, the wise-cracking Jennifer Tilly who plays the psychic trapped inside her own magic ball, and the briefly-scary zombies in the family crypt, to name just a few.
To say I have a lot of feels about what I’m about to tell you is an understatement.
Author Anne Rice, who passed away from complications of a stroke last December at age 80, had been a large part of my life for a very long time. I, like so many, fell in love with her first novel, Interview with the Vampire back in high school. From there I devoured all of her vampire and witch novels, buying each one in multiple formats. Because of Rice I took my first trip to New Orleans where much of these novels are set and where Rice herself lived at the time, in an antebellum mansion in the Garden District.
I fell as hard for NOLA as I did for Rice’s books and to this day I travel there several times a year to soak in atmosphere as dense and timeless as the immortals she wrote about. Throughout these years I came to have a nodding acquaintance with Rice herself, first seeing her at each of her book signings, and finally landing an annual invitation to attend her “Vampire Ball” held in NOLA each October. We didn’t hang out or anything, but she did call me by name and take time to chat each time we met.
I do not have a precise memory of when I first read one of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales. Perhaps it was a bowdlerized version of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” perhaps “Some Words With a Mummy” in one of my grandmother’s Reader’s Digest omnibuses. It might have been the Classic Comics version of “The Pit and the Pendulum.” I definitely saw most of the Roger Corman movie adaptations with Vincent Price on the 4:30 Movie on ABC. I know I picked up a copy of Scholastic Book’s collection, Eight Tales of Terror, at a used book sale at Our Lady of Good Counsel. The important thing is, Edgar Allan Poe‘s creations have been with me as a reader of the weird and the fantastic from my earliest days.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve actually read any of Poe’s stories, so, as the Halloween season is upon us, it seems the proper time to return to them. I had no doubt I would still enjoy them, but I really had no idea just how good and groundbreaking they really are. Lovecraft, in his seminal essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” stated that by focusing on the psychological and not the Gothic, “Poe’s spectres thus acquired a convincing malignity possessed by none of their predecessors, and established a new standard of realism in the annals of literary horror.” I don’t think it’s an overstatement. There are few boogeymen or vampires here; instead, it’s mostly warped and broken minds, the sadism of the vengeful, and the nightmares of the delirious.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is credited with creating the detective story (he didn’t), the modern short story (he was one of the earliest American practitioners of the form), and contemporary horror fiction (he helped). His life was plagued by misfortune and missteps and to this day, his death at the unfortunate young age of forty remains a mystery, though it has been attributed to alcoholism, drug addiction, syphilis, and even murder. Whatever the circumstances of his life, his work remains one of the pinnacles of American writing, of Romanticism, and of weird fiction.
Because I’ve been asked about the process by which I’ve been selecting stories for the Random Review series, I thought I’d take a moment to explain how the stories are selected.
I have a database of approximately 42,000 short stories that I own sorted by story title. When it comes time for me to select a story to review as part of this series, I role several dice (mostly ten sided) to determine which story should be read. I cross reference the numbers that come up on the die with the database to see what story I’ll be reviewing. This week, I rolled 28,223 which turned out to be Marie DesJardin’s short story “The Problem with Reproducible Bugs.”
One of the things I’m hoping to get out of this series, from a person point of view, is to discover authors and short stories that I’ve owned and have never read. Of course, I’m also hoping to share those discoveries, good or bad, with the readers of Black Gate.
Authors frequently introduce protagonists who are suffering from amnesia, or don’t know where they are, who they are, or what is happening to help provide an entry point for the reader, who often has to have those things explained in a science fiction story. In Marie DesJardin’s story “The Problem with Reproducible Bugs,” Vince’s inability to remember what is going on it central to the point of the story.
By late 1986, the Barbarian Boom was well into its deliberate self-parody phase — and all the better for it, frankly. If nothing else, self-parody is inexpensive, and if you have a rock-bottom budget anyway you might as well aim for something that’s within reach. Though the spate of barbarian films in the Eighties is beloved by fantasy nerds of a certain age, as we’ve seen in our previous instalments in this series, very few of them hold up to a contemporary rewatch. Thus, it’s a pleasure this week to cover two movies we can actually recommend! To prepare yourself properly, practice your “Hur hur hur!” ahead of time so you can laugh like a real barbarian.
