Tales From the Magician's Skull Blog May 4th 2022 Round-Up
Twentieth-century genre fiction produced a number of huge
talents that liked to try it all — writing across category labels in blissful
violation of what would one day become the standard practice of brand
marketing. Indeed, for prolific writers of both the pulp and science fiction
golden ages of magazine fiction, casting one’s net wide across the flimsy genre
partitions of the day was just a common-sense way to broaden your market.
Prolific author of short fiction, as well as essayist, editor (including a
stint at the helm of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction),
and novelist Avram Davidson stands right alongside genre-hopping giants like Poul
Anderson, Isaac Asimov, or Jack Vance as a writer that refused to stay fenced
in. Whether in his dozens of undefinable short stories, or his pulpish
far-future SF, magic-infused novels of alternate history (the Vergil Magus and Peregrine series), or tales of mystery and
weird horror set in imaginary nations of the contemporary world, Davidson
demonstrated a roving intellect ever-eager to explore the wild hinterlands of
speculative fiction.
The Appendix N is a list of prolific authors of science
fiction and fantasy. But Fletcher Pratt is not one of them, at least not in
comparison to most of the authors on the list. He primarily wrote historical
nonfiction about the Civil War, Napoleon, naval history, rockets, and World War
II. So why is Fletcher Pratt listed in the Appendix N and why does he have the
coveted “et al” listed after The Blue Star?
Well, digging a bit deeper into his writings and his career,
it is no surprise that Gary Gygax was smitten with this fellow….
Fletcher Pratt was a bearded, bespectacled, pipe-smoking
intellectual who raised marmosets in his spare time. And if you don’t know what
a marmoset looks like then I highly encourage you to pause reading this to do a
quick Google Image search of these adorable mini-monkeys. I promise that you
won’t regret it.
“As evening closed in they were threading through gorges
that hastened the coming of darkness. Often they looked back in the failing
light. No one desired to be last. And then Rudolfo, in the lead, halted
abruptly.
‘Before them in the twilight stood a great mound of human
skulls.”
When we are first introduced to Michael Bearn, young Breton
ship-master in Venetian employ, he and his shipwrecked crew are slaves to the
Turkish Sultan, Bayezid the Great, ‘the Thunderbolt.’ Bearn, talented,
headstrong, and proud, refuses to kneel before the conqueror, the ruler of an
empire stretching from the Danube to the Euphrates, and Bearn is cruelly cowed
when his arm is crushed by an iron sleeve. Crippled, brutalized, Bearn vows his
revenge to the Sultan’s laughing face — and thus colossal events are set
underway with the snapping of a man’s bones, and the humiliation of his soul.
For Bearn is a man of immense drive and cleverness, and Bayezid is not the only
great conqueror in the vast lands of the East . . .
In the storied list of Appendix N authors, there is one name
that encapsulates nearly the entire course of modern American science fiction
and fantasy: Jack Williamson. John Stewart Williamson was born on April 29th,
1908 in an adobe hut in what was then still the Arizona Territory. Seeking to
better themselves, the Williamson family travelled by horse-drawn covered wagon
to New Mexico in 1915, where Williamson recalled that they “homesteaded in
Eastern New Mexico in 1916 after the good land had been claimed. We were living
below the poverty line, struggling for survival.”
This isolated, hardscrabble existence continued throughout
Williamson’s entire youth, but his imagination and inquisitive mind helped him
to endure. As he describes, “I did a lot of farmwork—riding horses after a
string of cattle, gathering the corn, that sort of thing. Working alone so
often like that was naturally pretty boring, so I started creating these
endless epics and fictional cycles in which I was the principal character—all
this done simply as a way of keeping my mind alive.”
Few writers can boast as long and as productive a career as
SF Grand Master Jack Williamson — this ‘Dean of Science Fiction’ produced
scores of short stories and dozens of novels across multiple genres and series
during a lifetime that saw him publish work in over eight consecutive decades.
Getting his start in the era of the pulps and publishing right through until
the first decade of the twenty-first century, Williamson’s style may have
changed with time, but his adherence to straightforward storytelling, breakneck
adventure, and uncluttered prose remained a constant over his long career.
Williamson, who became a college professor after he achieved
success as a commercial writer, is credited with coining the terms
‘terraforming’ and ‘genetic engineering.’ He is possibly also the first to use
the term ‘psionics’ (perhaps this was what Gary Gygax was thinking of when he
listed Williamson as an influence on D&D in Appendix N?).
While most associated with his numerous science fiction shorts and series (Legion
of Space, Humanoids), Williamson also wrote grounded fantasies,
even horror, as with his werewolf novel, Darker Than You Think.
An English writer with a varied bibliography ranging from
humor, to dystopian science fiction, to mystery tales of the blind detective
Max Carrados, Ernest Bramah achieved literary success and is still best known
for his tales of itinerant Chinese storyteller, Kai Lung. Bramah’s combination
of understated humor, familiarity with East Asian culture and mythology, and
most especially his inspired ‘translation’ of the cadences and over-refinement
of antiquely formal and courtly Chinese into a playfully whimsical English,
proved not only popular with audiences, but enduringly influential for the more
fantastical varieties of Asian-themed fiction penned in the West over the last
hundred years.
Lin Carter chose both Kai Lung’s Golden Hours,
and Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy
series in the 1970s, and had the series continued there would have certainly
been more Kai Lung available had Carter wished — for unlike many of the
individual works or even specific authors Carter would reprint after decades of
relative obscurity, Bramah’s Kai Lung stories have never been long out of print
in over a century since their first publication.
