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I didn’t even know this book existed until I was doing research for my review of Tear of the Gods. When I was working on that, I discovered that there were originally plans for one or two more games after Return to Krondor, which was extended and novelized by Feist after the game came out.
This book, Jimmy and the Crawler, takes place almost immediately after the end of Tear of the Gods, and after the games were cancelled, there was not enough interest or money. Feist had originally planned to write two novels to round out the Riftwar Legacy Saga, but in the end all we got was one novella.
Well, I didn’t expect to be here this week! I was getting ready to do a review of a few Poul Anderson stories, when I sat down and cracked open Casino Royale. Now, I was a little underwhelmed by Diamonds Are Forever a few weeks ago, and Casino Royale was one of a few suggestions I got from comments, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.
But I was actually shocked by how good this book was.
I saw this at my local library and just had to give it a try. Robert E. Howard hasn’t steered me wrong yet, but honestly I wasn’t expecting too much—and I was pleasantly surprised to find my expectations were wrong.
This book contains seven El Borak stories, three with Kirby O’Donnell, and one with Steve Clarney. All of them are reasonably good, but the El Borak stories are the main course.
When I did my reading and review of Arthur Machen's Three Impostors a while back, I kept finding critics who said it was too like Robert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights. Well, now I've read the first volume of New Arabian Nights, and I think the critics were really digging when they came up with that one. I'll explain why in a minute.
There is more to Jules Verne's famous book about traveling into the Earth than I thought! This is what I learned when I went back to the second issue of Amazing Stories and saw the first part serialized there.
The original was published in French in 1864, then re-published in an expanded version in 1867. Then, the first English version was released in 1871, but here's the kicker: that first English version was drastically altered from what a straightforward translation would have been! The character names were changed, which may have been forgivable, but the structure of the story was actually pretty different, too. That "localized" English version was Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
I was flipping through a bunch of different stuff last weekend, trying to figure out what I wanted to read, when I realized I had read A Princess of Mars a while back, and hadn't gone any further than that!
So, I sat down with the second book in the Barsoom Saga, The Gods of Mars, and I think it was a little better than the first one, overall, though there were some tradeoffs.
This week I went back and re-read The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, a collection of Robert E. Howard's Kane stories, including both the stories published between 1928 and 1932 and a bunch of unpublished works discovered after Howard's untimely death and published in or around 1968.
Instead of taking place in a fantasy past, Howard uses Africa in the late 1500s as his fantasy setting. Most of these stories take place in the dark unknown reaches of Africa, long before Europeans had explored the continent.
Kane has a bad case of wanderlust and consistently finds himself venturing aimlessly into these forbidding lands, and he also has a tendency to be motivated by revenge or rescue of some maiden in distress. Kane has a hint of the errant knight in his manner, but he leans much more heavily on the righteousness and inflexibility of the Puritan.
Howard typically confines each story to the most important bits of the tale. He will skip huge amounts of time in a story to get from one confrontation to another. This method has both good and bad sides, keeping the stories short and sweet, but missing a lot of opportunities for more characters and development.
Kane is a tall, rangy man described as made of "spring steel" and "whalebone." He is an excellent fencer and a crack shot with pistol or musket.
The stories are dark and violent, with a strong sense of hopelessness, and the lurking evil of dark and dead gods and their followers. We get some crossovers with Kull's mythical Atlantis as well as some transplants of European and Mediterranean myths into the darkest corners of Africa.
The writing is full of vivid, deeply metaphorical descriptions of places, people, and actions. It almost ranges into flowery sometimes, but manages to stop short of that line. There is some dialect and patois, as well as some old words, but one thing Howard likes to do in these stories is throw in some very obscure words, as well. We get lots of descriptions of Kane's state of mind, and frequent dialogue to push forward the story. Howard's description of gore is powerful, unflinching, and pervasive. I don't often see stories that describe a man's scalp as half hanging off as he fights for his life.
Some of these "short" stories are actually pretty long for that name. They range up to nearly 80 pages for the longest Kane story.
The plots move in unexpected ways sometimes, which keeps things fresh, interesting, and unpredictable. Dark magic and the worship of dark magic causes unexpected things to happen, and madness and misunderstanding play large roles in some of the stories.
The edition of the book that I have is full of illustrations, nice little ink drawings by Gary Gianni.
Unlike a lot of stories written around the same time, while beautiful women in various states of undress appear frequently, they generally do not affect Kane the way a typical pulp protagonist would react, and the descriptions tend toward the non-graphic. The Alien novels I read and reviewed recently reveled in being graphic, but the Kane stories treat nudity almost with sterility. "She was naked except for..." is about as graphic as Howard gets, which is still pretty tame by 1920s pulp standards.
These are excellent short stories, ranging from solid action/adventure fodder to genuinely thoughtful and unique tales. The descriptions by Howard are so good that the stories are worth reading just for those. The poetic elements lend a bit of an old, epic feel to the Kane world, which I enjoyed. Later stories make use of the "transplanted myth/ancient thing" method to create some very cool plot points.
I haven't read much Conan but my impression is that I like Kane better in general. I like the character more, and his adventures are more grounded, though still with a good dose of fantasy.
For spoilers, see the appropriate chapters in the embedded video above. I put a separate chapter for each piece from the book.
Finally got a chance to read the third book in this Aliens omnibus: The Female War, by Steve Perry and Stephani Perry. Every time I read one of these, I learn something new, and this time it was that these books--all three of them--were novelizations of comic books, and not the other way around, as I thought when I reviewed the first two.
Anyway, this book continues the story of Billie and Wilks, with surprise ending guest from the previous book, Ripley! People are having a new kind of dream about the aliens on Gateway station, and this book is about figuring out what the dreams mean and what can be done about them.
I was writing an essay and I needed a name for a fictional European country. If you've seen my videos, you'll be familiar with the "Read Mises" poster in the background, and I thought of his "Ruritania" that he used for some of his examples.
But I was struck with a thought: Surely, Mises had the creativity to come up with a fictional country name, but did he? After a little digging, I found that the name Ruritania dates back to this adventure novel from 1894, by Anthony Hope. This book was so popular that it spawned a slew of imitators, satirists, and parodies, but the name "Ruritania" also got used in scholarly writings, too!
Nightmare Asylum is the second novel in this Aliens Omnibus I got. Like Earth Hive, it was written by Steve Perry, and released in 1993, after the movie Alien 3. It is a direct continuation of the story of Earth Hive.
This week I sat down with a collection of Kull stories by Robert E. Howard called Kull: Exile of Atlantis. I read and reviewed The Shadow Kingdom a while back, and I thought it might be fun to go through a bit more Kull and see what I thought.
This week I've got a strong recommendation for a short story. Filling about nine pages of the (admittedly dense) Weird Tales, "The Two Men Who Murdered Each Other" is not a creepy story, but a strange tragedy!
Written by Valma Clark and published in the July/August 1923 issue of WT, it's excellently written, with a gentle but consistent flow and a timeless style. The prose is detailed without being overly flowery or wordy, and the three characters are developed quite well considering the limited space.
This book was attached to the end of the Lensman Super Pack I bought a long time ago, but after I read through all of the main books, I looked at this one and it seemed like it was mostly unrelated to the Lensman series, at least in the first few pages that I read. So, I neglected it for a while.
Last weekend, I decided to give it a look, and I quite liked what I found. This book is a novel created by stitching together three of Doc Smith's stories about a guy named Neal Cloud. It has also been called Masters of the Vortex, but the version I read was called The Vortex Blaster. There might be some small differences between versions.
This is a whale of a book. I think that I spent a few hours combing through various versions until I found this one, which was the first one that didn't seem to be significantly abridged.
The whole thing is over twelve hundred pages.
The translation I'm looking at is by John Ormsby, from 1885, and others have said this version is both "thorough and accurate."
I felt like it was time for a return to the good old pulp adventures of E.E. "Doc" Smith, so I gave Skylark of Valeron a read!
This book starts with a somewhat hasty rewrite of a scene from the last book: Remember when DuQuesne appeared to... die? Well, as you may have expected (and as you definitely expected if you've read enough Smith), it was a ruse! DuQuesne is alive and well and is hatching a dastardly plot, as is his wont.
First published in Weird Tales all the way back in August 1929 (Volume 14, No. 2), this story is the first appearance of Kull of Atlantis, a character Robert E. Howard would write several short stories about and who would be part of the inspiration of his later character, Conan.
This story is short but it does a lot. It establishes the character and background of Kull, some of his major allies, and one of his major motivations: to fight the serpent-men!
An excellent video by a channel called Memovision crossed my feed the other day, and he did a great examination of the John Carter movie, made by Disney in 2012, and part of the reason why you aren't seeing these great pulp, public-domain stories made into movies.
Ostensibly Memovision's video is about the flop of the movie, but he did some digging and found out some stuff that must have been hard to find.
This was quite an eye-opener. As I had been reading some of E.E. "Doc" Smith's books, someone mentioned to me that several of his concepts for aliens were very inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars series (or, as I've learned, the "Barsoom" series), and never having read any Burroughs, I thought it might be fun to give the first book a read!
When I was a little kid, my dad had a stack of little comic books with the name Tintin on them. Every once in a while, I would find that stack and read one or two of them. They are fun, colorful adventure stories, each generally taking place in some unfamiliar country.
Later on, I bought a big collection of them, which included twenty-two completed comics and one that Herge wasn't able to finish before he passed away.
Back then, I had no notion of order, so I just read whatever book caught my fancy. Strongest in my memory are "The Shooting Star," "Tintin and the Picaros," and "The Castafiore Emerald."
Looking through the old pulps, I found this neat little novella in the first issue of Astounding Stories of Super-Science, from all the way back in January 1930. It's called "Phantoms of Reality" and it was written by Ray Cummings.
Astounding Stories is generally a bit campier than Amazing Stories, and this novelette is a good example. It's a straightforward action-adventure story, in which the main characters visit a world of another dimension around our own. The prose is engaging, and more descriptive of people than of places.
