Apr 4: Adventures in Fiction: Stanley G. Weinbaum by
Ngo Vinh-Hoi
Not many authors can be credited with changing the entire trajectory
of a genre, yet Stanley Grauman Weinbaum managed to do so with his very first
published science fiction story A Martian Odyssey. The story first
appeared in the July 1934 issue of the science fiction pulp magazine Wonder
Stories, which was a distant third in popularity to Astounding
Stories and Amazing Stories. Forty years later, no less a
figure than Isaac Asimov would declare that “hidden in this obscure
magazine, A Martian Odyssey had the effect on the field of an
exploding grenade. With this single-story, Weinbaum was instantly recognized as
the world’s best living science-fiction writer, and at once almost every writer
in the field tried to imitate him.”
Apr 5: Classic Covers: Adventure Magazine
At its height, Adventure Magazine had a
circulation of over 300 thousand and was published three times a month, marking
it as one of the most successful fiction pulps of all time (in 1935 Time
Magazine dubbed Adventure ‘The No. 1 Pulp’). Adventure gave
the audience just what the title suggested; pulse-pounding tales set in exotic
locales, desperate journeys on land and sea, western gunfights, jungle
explorations, and blade-whirling exploits throughout history. It even
frequently intersected with real-world adventures offering true (ish!) accounts
of modern day acts of exploration and daring. A host of classic adventure
writers appeared in its pages, such as H. Rider Haggard, Rafael Sabbatini,
Baroness Orczy, John Buchan, Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb, and H. Bedford Jones.
Apr 8: A Look at Edgar Rice Burroughs’ I Am A Barbarian
If the nickname “Little Boots” doesn’t fill you with dread
perhaps it will in the original Latin: Caligula. The byword for depraved
tyranny, the quintessential Mad Monarch, Caligula’s brief reign as third
Emperor of Rome has been the fascinating stuff of prurient legend and
scandalous rumor for nearly two thousand years. A megalomaniac combining
arbitrary cruelty with a wicked sense of humor – flinging coins to the poor
after first heating them in a brazier, turning the Imperial Palace into a
brothel to pimp the wives of senators, ordering his legions to attack the
oceans and gather seashells as plunder, appointing his favorite horse to the
Senate – this “viper for the people of Rome” is like a joke you’re ashamed to
laugh at, or a car crash from which you can’t look away. Separating the truth
of Caligula’s reign from the rumors and embellishments is the mostly impossible
task of historians – but using it as a backdrop for titillating fiction is the
job of storytellers, something Edgar Rice Burroughs’ I Am a Barbarian does with
page-turning success.
Apr 12: Where to Start With Harold Lamb
It wasn’t so long ago that the fiction of Harold Lamb was
best known only as a footnote in the old Lancer Conan books, mentioned in
passing as being important and influential but almost completely unavailable.
All that could be found of his prose were some late novels and his biographies,
and, fine as those biographies are, neither were foundational works of
sword-and-sorcery. Today, though, most of Lamb’s fiction is in print once
more, and fairly easy to lay hands on, just like the histories, many of
which are retained to this day by libraries across the United States. So much
is out there now it can actually be difficult to know where to start. You need
no longer scratch your head in wonder, however – this essay will show you the
way.
Apr 15: Classic Covers: Harold Lamb’s Histories
What do you get when you cross an expert adventure storyteller with a linguistically-gifted polymath? Some of the greatest popular histories ever written. While Harold Lamb’s fiction was familiar to readers of Adventure magazine, it was his gripping histories and biographies, starting with 1927’s Genghis Khan, that won him international acclaim, and made him an acknowledged expert in both Hollywood and the State Department.
Here in the Goodman Games world, we’ve been rediscovering
the works of Harold Lamb. He wrote timeless adventure stories that influenced a
bevy of Appendix N authors, most notably Robert Howard. The strength of Lamb’s
tales are tight plotting, crisply drawn characters and rich historical detail.
But as enjoyable as Lamb’s tales are, they lack some of the cardinal elements
of Appendix N literature and DCC RPG adventures: supernatural
magic, brooding extra-human entities from beyond space, and the never-ending
struggle between Law and Chaos. Without these elements, what can we draw from
these adventure stories to enrich our adventures for DCC RPG? For
this essay, I’ll discuss the Khlit stories collected in Wolf of the
Steppes. These tales are just a fraction of Lamb’s pulp
stories, but still provide plenty of useful ideas for DCC adventures.
