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Rogue Blades Presents: All Good Things Must Come to a … Change!

Rogue Blades Presents: All Good Things Must Come to a … Change!

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All good things must come to an end. Sort of. Kind of. But not exactly.

This will be my last Rogue Blades article for Black Gate. This doesn’t mean I’m going anywhere. No. One of my articles will still be here every other Friday. And no, I’m not stepping down as vice president of the Rogue Blades Foundation, a non-profit which focuses on all things heroic, especially heroic literature.

What is changing is that the Rogue Blades Foundation and its for-profit publishing side, Rogue Blades Entertainment, will be coming together on a new Web site, Rogue Blades. The new site will not only feature news about both sides of this publishing venture, but will also present weekly articles from a variety of writers, including myself. So I’ll be penning articles about the heroic over at Rogue Blades.

As for my future here at Black Gate, as mentioned above, I’ll keep writing articles here, but now I’ll have more freedom to write about other topics, many which might be related to heroic literature but not necessarily.

As for what I’ll be writing here, I’ve a number of subjects I’d like to cover. For instance, I’ve long been a fan of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct police procedural novels, and I’m considering a series on each of those books, though at 55 novels and a handful of shorter works, I have to admit that’s a rather daunting task. Other subjects I’d like to tackle are older tabletop role playing games that don’t see as much love as I’d like; Dungeons & Dragons is well covered online and even Star Frontiers has received some recent love here at Black Gate, but I’d like to take a look back at such games as Dragonquest, Lords of Creation, Car Wars and the original Deadlands, plus others as they come to mind. It’s also possible, even likely, I’ll sometimes write about fiction I’m reading or movies or shows I’m watching.

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Rogue Blades Author: Robert E. Howard: A European Perspective

Rogue Blades Author: Robert E. Howard: A European Perspective

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The following is an excerpt from Michael Moorcock’s essay for Robert E. Howard Changed My Life, an upcoming book from the Rogue Blades Foundation.

Robert E. Howard wrote directly in a tradition going back to the first great American hero Natty Bumppo and the first great American novelist, Fenimore Cooper, who shared the same puritanical suspicion of ‘civilization’ and authority with Conan and most of Howard’s other heroes. Based firmly on the legend of Daniel Boone, already fictionalized in broadsheets and shilling shockers published everywhere in America and Europe, the Romantic American was soon established as a popular figure of fiction and folklore. Indeed, on occasions the American ‘noble savage’ often sold better in what would be considered over-civilized European nations than he did in his native land (where the reality might have been at closer proximity to readers in Saint Louis and Memphis than to those in London or Moscow). This explained the massive bestsellers featuring ‘free spirits’ often found in the Gothic novels which were frequently selling at the same time! Romance of this kind would often be pilloried by more sophisticated authors of the day but not by the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson, Alexandre Dumas or Karl May (whose Old Shatterhand continued his career, like the others, in films well into the 20th century).

After Mowgli, Tarzan, of course, was probably the most famous popular noble savage to sniff warily at the over-fed minions of a greedy and uncaring civilization and indeed, until he was rather poorly translated into a variety of romance languages in particular, Conan was not widely well-known in Europe outside Britain (where Howard’s A Gent from Bear Creek had been published in 1937) until the 1970s via his Marvel Comics incarnations. In fact, he became better known in the UK than he was in the US, thanks to a young man in London named Tom Boardman, a popular figure at English fantastica conventions during the 1950s and ’60s, who had begun his career in his father’s firm at a very young age. His father liked publishing Westerns and Western comics in a very recognizable style, including a yearly hardback Buffalo Bill Annual with one distinctive artist doing all the drawing and writing all the scripts. He published through the Woolworth chain of stores a sepia reprint version of full-color comics from the Fawcett publishing chain. These fantasy comics revealed a niche in the market. He began to put out Captain Marvel, Ibis, Bulletman and a whole range of ‘science heroes,’ superheroes, and wizards. As a schoolboy I bought his publications wherever I could find them.

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Rogue Blades Author: An Unexpected Gift

Rogue Blades Author: An Unexpected Gift

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Howard changed my lifeThe following is an excerpt from Barbara Ingram Baum’s essay for Robert E. Howard Changed My Life, an upcoming book from the Rogue Blades Foundation.

May 25, 1995, marked a profound change in my life. Alla Ray Morris, or ‘Pat’ as we called her, passed away unexpectedly. When my husband, Jack, met with her attorneys after her funeral, he was shocked to learn she had bequeathed her rights in Robert E. Howard’s works to him, to his sister Terry, and to their mother, Zora Mae Baum Bryant, whom she had named as executrix of her estate. I could never have imagined the impact this gift would have on my life.

Jack’s father had passed away in 1971, and several years later his mother married Elliott Bryant, a kind, loving widower who embraced his new family as Zora Mae had two adult children, a daughter-in-law, and three young grandchildren. Elliott’s parents and younger brother were deceased, but he maintained a close relationship with his aunt, Alla Ray Kuykendall (‘Auntie K’) and her daughter, Alla Ray Morris (‘Pat’), who lived in the nearby town of Ranger, Texas. Whenever we gathered at the house in Cross Plains for holidays, Auntie K and Pat were always included, and over the years they became family to all of us as well. So even after Elliott died suddenly in 1982, the relationship continued, and every week Jack’s mother drove to Ranger to play bridge with the Kuykendalls and their friends. I believe she and Pat became even closer after Auntie K passed away. Nevertheless, we were stunned when Pat suddenly died and we learned she had included us in her will — it was totally unexpected.

We knew nothing about Robert E. Howard or his works. However, we recalled Zora Mae, Elliott, Auntie K, and Pat had attended the showing of the film Conan the Barbarian, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, at the Paramount Theatre in Abilene, but Jack and I had never seen the film or read any of Howard’s works or talked about Howard or discussed the Kuykendalls’ ownership at family gatherings. I faintly remembered comments about Howard Days, but we had never discussed those events, nor had we attended. Interestingly, though, Jack’s mother kept a Conan calendar on her kitchen wall — which I know now was a Ken Kelly scene from “People of the Black Circle.” (You would have to know Jack’s mother to appreciate how completely out of character it was for her to have a heroic fantasy calendar on her wall. Zora Mae was very much a traditionalist and was very particular about her home and its accessories.)

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Rogue Blades Presents: What Would Your Hero Say to You?

Rogue Blades Presents: What Would Your Hero Say to You?

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weird talesWhen I started out as a writer of fiction in the late 1980s, one of my favorite magazines was Weird Tales. Over the next decade or so, I submitted a half dozen stories to Weird Tales, none of which were ever accepted for publication. Still, even though none of my tales ever landed there, I learned a lot from the letters I received from one of the editors, George H. Scithers.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Mr. Scithers. If not, surely you’ve heard of some of his work. He was the first editor for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, for which he won two Hugo awards. He was also editor at Amazing Stories, and of numerous anthologies. At Weird Tales, he won a World Fantasy Award along with Darrell Schweitzer. He was known among writers and readers and editors.

Unfortunately we lost Mr. Scithers a decade ago, but his legacy lives on in the work he produced and in fandom. Many of today’s readers probably don’t even realize how much they owe to this gentleman.

And “gentleman” is not a word I use lightly. I never knew Mr. Scithers personally. He and I never met. I can’t speak to his everyday attitudes and demeanor. Yet he was always kind and supportive in the reply letters he wrote back to me as a budding writer. He always had good things to say while not being afraid to point out where I needed to polish. He could be critical without being overbearing and negative, a trait that seems lost in today’s world. Also, I’ve met with or had correspondence with other people who actually did know or had at least met Mr. Scithers, and every single one of those individuals has had good things to say about George. So I feel my calling him a “gentleman” is most apt, especially as every correspondence I had with him was most friendly and congenial.

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Rogue Blades Foundation Announces Upcoming Second Book: The Lost Empire of Sol

Rogue Blades Foundation Announces Upcoming Second Book: The Lost Empire of Sol

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the-lost-empire-of-sol-front-cover-small

Not sitting on its laurels, the recently-formed non-profit publisher Rogue Blades Foundation (RBF) last week announced the upcoming release of its second book, Scott Oden Presents The Lost Empire of Sol: An Anthology of Sword & Planet Tales.

Edited by Jason M Waltz and Fletcher Vredenburgh, this collection brings together ten stories of adventure and excitement from across a gloomy and ancient solar system far older than the one known to us. From the back cover of the book, “The legends speak of a united Empire that spanned the entire system.” Then, “All that is certain is that when the Daemons came, they brought a level of destruction not experienced in countless millennia.” And, “In the end, the Empire was fractured in the wake of the Daemons’ passing. Some worlds maintained tenuous contact; others were blasted into a state that left them bereft of their own history …”

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