This blog has lain fallow lo these many moons. The intertubes are full of personal difficulties and tragedies, no need to dwell on those here and now, ‘cept to say I should be posting a bit more. Perhaps a lot more.
I’ll kickoff my re-commitment to scattering electrons with a review of the latest TFTMS. An attractive cover despite the silliness of the chainmail bikini as a concept in general. The editorial conveys excitement for both the magazine and sword and sorcery in general.
I got this collection of short stories from Amazon last month, and took my time reading the stories. Edited by veteran Robert M. Price, this is a good collection of sword and sorcery tales. Some feature long-standing characters, others have newer protagonists. Price states in his intro that we need heroic stories like this now because of the “slave mentality” and malaise that grips our current culture, where heroes are scorned. Given the political bend of both the right and the left, I agree with his assessment. Not sure that this book will counter the larger movement, but it is a nice respite.
A quick note on the editing: there are some lapses, like some spelling and paragraph indentation. This seems to be endemic in the anthologies I have read lately. Not sure why. Is the carelessness of social media style infecting the editing profession? Anyway…
The first story is “Spawn of the Sea God” by Adrian Cole. Cole has been around since the ’70s, and he is a skilled writer. It features Elak of Atlantis, who was one of the first sword-swingers to stalk the pages of Weird Tales after Robert E. Howard’s death, created by prolific pulpster Henry Kuttner. An intersesting surprise to see the old character in new stories, but Cole has the knowledge and skill to pull it off.
Niall of the Far Travels by Gardner F. Fox – A Review of the Collection
First things first – the editing is the worst I have ever seen in a printed work. The front page refers to the process as “digitally transcribed” and maybe there is a difference between that and actual editing. But at any rate, the publisher should be ashamed. Virtually every single page has multiple misspellings or syntax errors or simple mistakes like extra quotation marks. Some paragraph spacings are omitted. After a while, the brain adjusts and you can plow forward in reading, but it is sad to see so many simple errors in a published work. At some point, a real editor should have had the chance to look at this manuscript.
So – Niall. The stories are not as great as I remember from reading them in Dragon Magazine. They are decent, and I am glad I re-read them, but they are too often solved by hand-waving from the gods. That is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.
Because Niall’s lover is Emalkartha the Evil, a goddess of demons, or at least her human form as Lylthia. I like the passion they have for each other, it comes across as real. But pretty much every story has her granting him her divine protections in order to survive his ordeals. While he is a great warrior, and that is shown as much as being told, only a few of the stories are resolved by his own abilities.
The quality of the writing is pretty good. Fox had a reputation as being a hack writer, and there a few convincing examples of this (I read one of his Kothar novels where the ancient city they are traveling to changes names halfway into the story). He relies on a few tropes and sayings to fill some space. If he were writing today, he probably would not have been as successful, as the quality of the writing in today’s crowded markets is much higher.
Despite this, I still like Niall, and his tales. My teen-aged self loved the cover to Dragon #38 and the depiction of Lylthia, and Niall looked different from other barbarian heroes. I guess that is why these stories took on a large prominence in my mind. Reading them today, they are not great, but they’re OK. None of them stand out as being really strong tales individually, but there are quite a few scenes and passages that are memorable. And they have a vitality that I find missing from most of the better-written fiction of today.
I’m glad I got the collection; but the lack of editing is a travesty.
The power here was restored Monday; the internet and cable was restored yesterday. I’m not complaining; the guys on the Gulf Coast have it infinitely worse. The power outage we experienced is a minor annoyance compared to their new reality.
One afternoon while home from work I got a chance to read through the booklet of short pulp stories I’d gotten through Amazon, Broadswords and Blasters issue #1. This is a brief review.
Here is the belated review! Also, I have put a few more authors and works on the Authors Page, and created a new Page for gaming resources. I figured out how to put a Pages widget in the right hand column of stuff (pretty easy, actually).
Review of Tales From the Magician’s Skull #2
I was very excited to receive the second issue of TftMS. If you looked at my review of issue #1, you know I didn’t like every story, but all were well-written, and some were great. So it was with eagerness that I tore into the second issue the night that it showed up. After that, though, I paced my reading out a bit more.
I am going to do something differently this time: a mostly spoiler-free review. I think I can still discuss the stories without giving them away, though a few plot elements will be revealed. Continue reading “Review of Tales from the Magician’s Skull #2”
There is a revival of the Sword and Sorcery genre afoot. TFTMS is the most recent artifact of the movement. It acknowledges Appendix N as its main influence; given that its publisher, Goodman Games, claims the same about its Dungeon Crawl Classics role-playing game (and the inclusion of game stats for DCC at the back of the magazine for each story), this is no surprise. Appendix N is hot right now. Continue reading “Review of Tales from the Magician’s Skull #1”
