Friday, January 28, 2022

TFMS - mid-end Jan 2022 Blog Roundup

Tales from the Magician's Skull Blog Roundup, mid to end-Jan 2022

BLOG = https://goodman-games.com/tftms/

Skull Champion of the Fifth Order, Bill Ward, continues to marshal his army of articles! Here is the latest headlines (linked) with blurbs:

JAN 26 Adventures in Fiction: Philip Jose Farmer by Jeff Goad
https://goodman-games.com/tftms/2022/...
Today we are celebrating the birthday of Philip José Farmer. While he isn’t around to celebrate this day with us, his books are still here inspiring writers and game designers as they have for decades past.
Farmer found early acclaim in the pulps, winning the Hugo in 1953 for Best New SF Author only a year after the publication of his first tale in Startling Stories. He continued writing for Startling Stories where his work would be found beside that of other Appendix N luminaries like Jack Vance and Fletcher Pratt. Other early works can be found in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a publication that features a letter to the editor from Gary Gygax himself in the August 1963 issue.
Farmer’s first novel, The Green Odyssey, was published by Ballantine Books in 1957 and was the start of a prolific output of novels for Ballantine Books, Ace Paperbacks, and other publishing houses. He released 15 novels in the 1960s then topped that with another 23 in the 1970s!

JAN 25 Classic Covers: The Savage Sword of Conan
https://goodman-games.com/tftms/2022/...
How do you skirt a restrictive comics code and make visual Conan stories with the requisite blood-pumping grittiness that is integral to Howard’s adventures? You make a magazine of course! Already popular in his initial comic book incarnation of Conan the Barbarian, Marvel introduced the more adult-oriented The Savage Sword of Conan in 1974, quickly achieving a wide circulation and, thanks to writer and editor Roy Thomas’ legendary first 60 issue run, eventual cult classic status. Savage Sword featured straight Howard adaptations, pastiche, and original stories, and included more than just Conan tales but adventures from other popular Howard characters such as Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and King Kull.

JAN 23 The Best Of The Conan Pastiche Novels by Howard Andrew Jones
https://goodman-games.com/tftms/2022/...
If I didn’t love the writing of Robert E. Howard I would probably never have bothered with any Conan pastiche. As a matter of fact, those Conan novels on store shelves in the ’70s and ’80s made me so skeptical of Conan that I didn’t try Robert E. Howard’s fiction until years later. I wrongly assumed that because the series looked cheap and mass-produced that Howard’s writing would sound that way. (Robert E. Howard, of course, had nothing to do with the mass marketing of his character, having been dead for decades before that marketing was carried out by other hands.)
You can fit the sum total of all the Conan that Howard wrote (including some fragments and rejected stories) into one large hardback. That’s not a lot of fiction about such a great character, and so for decades, people have been trying to create new tales of adventure starring Conan, mostly because they wanted MORE!

JAN 22 Adventures in Fiction: Robert E. Howard
https://goodman-games.com/tftms/2022/...
There may not be a more iconic character in fantasy—and particularly sword and sorcery—fiction than Conan the Barbarian. From his first appearance in Weird Tales back in 1932, the character has influenced how we see any iconic sword-wielding hero. And for that, we can thank Robert E. Howard.
Over the years a number of posts on our site have been focused on Mr. Howard and his impact not just on literature, but also on the world of role-playing games. All of those posts can be found under our Adventures in Fiction banner, but we want to give you direct links to a trio of our favorites, as well as the post included here. So, after reading below, be sure to go give a look at Films of High Adventure: Robert E. Howard, Real Life Adventures – The Robert E. Howard House, and Gen Con Videos, Part 1: Gaming in the Spirit of Robert E. Howard.

JAN 21 It Was a Dark and Silly Night – A Look at John Bellairs’ The Face in the Frost
https://goodman-games.com/tftms/2022/...
Whimsy and suspense don’t generally mesh all that well together, for they tend to swing toward opposite poles of reader engagement. Whimsy tickles the intellect, relying on novel juxtapositions and a great deal of textual playfulness – it’s cute, it’s precise, and most often it resides in a place of certainty and safety. Suspense – or more accurately in the case of John Bellairs’ 1969 debut novel The Face in the Frost, dread – is instead the assassin slipping past the intellect to knife that deepest part of the hind-brain, or perhaps its better to say its the cold, rhythmic pounding of subtle waves of suggestion that periodically climax in the massive erosive collapse of the shoreline of a reader’s composure. This horror effect absolutely requires a sort of visceral engagement with the material, a thorough Secondary Belief just like with fantasy – the kind of thing that jokey anachronisms, deliberate wordplay, and humorous allusions would seem to undermine at every turn. But Bellairs manages the trick of juggling these disparate elements with the sure confidence of a natural storyteller in a concise, captivating way that rarely places a foot wrong and never comes close to overstaying its welcome.

JAN 20 Adventures in Fiction: Abraham Merritt by James Maliszewski
https://goodman-games.com/tftms/2022/...
Of all the literary influences on D&D and DCC RPG, Abraham Merritt is perhaps the “most-influential of the least-known.” His work is rarely read in this modern time, yet he is named by Gary Gygax as one of “the most immediate influences on AD&D. Today, on January 20, 2020, the 136th anniversary of his birth, we provide a little more insight into this little-read but well-deserving author. You can also learn about all the Appendix N authors by listening to the Appendix N Book Club. For Merritt in particular, his most famous work, The Moon Pool, was recently covered in a special session on the Appendix N Podcast in which Joseph Goodman participated.

JAN 19 Appendix N Archaeology: Edgar Allan Poe by Bradley K McDevitt
https://goodman-games.com/tftms/2022/...
Ok, class, before we start… let’s have a show of hands. Who here thinks about reading Edgar Allan Poe and gets traumatic flashbacks to seventh-grade English?
I thought so. Having the father of the modern horror story force-fed us tends to have that effect, as opposed to other lesser writers like Lovecraft, Howard, or Tolkien, all of whom we had to discover on our own.
Poe was the first successful writer to pen stories intended with no purpose but to ensure the reader would not have pleasant dreams that night. I dare anyone suffering from claustrophobia to go back and read A Cask of Amontillado or The Black Cat and then sleep with the lights off. Go ahead, I double-dog dare you.

JAN 18 Adventures in Fiction: John Bellairs by Ngo Vinh-Hoi
https://goodman-games.com/tftms/2022/...
John Anthony Bellairs was born on January 17th, 1938 in Marshall, Michigan, which he described as “full of strange and enormous old houses, and the place must have worked on [his] imagination.” A shy and overweight child, he “would walk back and forth between [his] home and Catholic school and have medieval fantasies featuring [himself] as the hero.” He found refuge in books, excelling in college as an English major and even appearing on an episode of the TV quiz show G.E. College Bowl in 1959, where he recited the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales in fluent Middle English. After getting his Master’s degree Bellairs taught English at several colleges across the midwest before taking time off in 1967 when he moved to Bristol, England, for a year to concentrate on his fiction writing. Many years later a fan asked Bellairs about his time in England only to have him reply “I lived for a year in Bristol [England], and it was the most miserable year of my life.” Bellairs’s misery was everyone else’s good fortune though, as this is when he wrote The Face in the Frost.

JAN 14 Where to Start With Robert E. Howard
https://goodman-games.com/tftms/2022/...
Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) was a giant and a father to giants, his literary creations so potent that they have informed popular culture and permeated mass consciousness down to the present day. But their very ubiquity can obscure and deceive – if two people strike up a conversation about Conan, are they actually talking about the same Conan? What’s going on with all of these other writers penning stories of Howard’s heroes, and do they need to be read in order? Out of the dozens of reprints and collections over the years, just where do you actually start?

Tuesday, January 11, 2022

TFMS bi-weekly Blog Roundup

 


Tales from the Magician's Skull Blog Roundup, end-Dec-2021 to min-Jan 2022
Skull Champion of the Fifth Order, Bill Ward, continues to marshal his army of articles! Here are the latest headlines (linked) with blurbs:

Dec 27: Appendix N Archaeology: Clark Ashton Smith by Michael Curtis

Gamers often point to Appendix N and decry the absence of a particular author (or three, or seven, or…), declaring Gygax’s omission of them to be a literary crime of some sort. Putting aside the unbelievable idea that gamers may complain about things for the moment, we must realize that Appendix N is not a list one can argue with. It is a catalog of all the literary influences Gygax chose to recognize as wellsprings from which Dungeons & Dragons flowed. Since it is representative of one man’s work, we can’t claim he made the error of excluding a particular author, even if we believe we can see their influence in the final product. Game design, like art, is a subjective process and one tends to see what one is inclined to see.

Dec 28: The Self-Made Mind: The Art of Clark Ashton Smith

Clark Ashton Smith, an untutored genius self-educated in both poetry and pulp, also turned his restless mind to art. In everything from his simple line sketches and watercolor landscapes, to his carving and sculpture, Smith demonstrates the same characteristics of baroque intricacy, imaginative grotesquery, and dark humor that are a hallmark of his writing.

Dec 29: New In The Online Store: Tales From The Magician’s Skull #0

This may be #0, but it’s certainly far more than zero.

Back by popular demand, resurrected from the dim corridors of lost time, it’s TFTMS #0! This special issue of Tales From the Magician’s Skull was only available to Kickstarter backers — but now it’s back and available as a PDF! It’s filled with stories and articles about sword-and-sorcery fiction, and features a spectacular cover by legendary artist Ian Miller! Let’s take a look!

Jan 3: Classic Covers: J.R.R. Tolkien

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was the book that launched a thousand trilogies, and made Tolkien’s name synonymous not just with modern fantasy fiction, but publishing mega-success. With more copies, in more languages, in more editions, than anything else in its category, and with an entire sub-industry spun out of publishing various notes, unpublished drafts, and side-excursions of its author, The Lord of the Rings remains the gold standard by which all other secondary worlds, and all other fantasy blockbusters, are judged. With covers ranging from the iconic to the iconographic, the literal to the surreal, many even featuring the art of the good Professor himself, and with editions spanning leather-bound limited-run collectibles to utterly ubiquitous mass-market paperbacks, copies of Tolkien are as ever-present and universal in the physical world of books and book collections as the tales they tell are ingrained in the imaginations of modern readers.

Jan 7: A Kind of Elvish Craft: Quotations from The Lord of the Rings

“To make a Secondary World . . . commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labor and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode.” — J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories”

J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal lecture/essay “On Fairy-Stories” is nothing short of a manifesto of his art, and a spiritedly reasoned elaboration of his Theory of Story — specifically Fairy-Stories, or tales of the Land of Faërie.

Jan 11: Reading About Robert E. Howard

It’s safe to say Robert E. Howard has passionate fans. And this passion goes beyond buying stacks of books and old comics and limited edition resin sculptures, beyond pilgrimages to Cross Plains or Valeria cosplay, beyond, even, mimeographing ‘zines in their basement or writing fiction inspired by Howard’s example. For you see, Howard’s fans have dared to set their sandalled feet upon the tumbled jeweled thrones of literary criticism, and they’ve been trampling such thrones for decades. Here’s a look at just some of what they’ve been saying.

 




Tuesday, January 4, 2022

Rogues in the House Podcast

As posted on Black Gate:

GO ROGUE!: ROGUES IN THE HOUSE, THE ULTIMATE SWORD & SORCERY PODCAST

Rogues in the House

In 1934, Weird Tales magazine published Robert E. Howard's Conan story "Rogues in the House." Bob Byrne covered the story on Black Gate as part of his "Hither Came Conan" series.

Just a few years ago, in late 2018, Sword & Sorcery enthusiasts and content creators forged Rogues in the House - the Ultimate S&S Podcast (the link is a portal page to multiple listening Apps). This post spotlights it because it is more than just a source of perspectives. The crew genuinely wants to support a growing community. Their roundtable discussions always start with the "Bazaar of the Bizarre" round table, in which the cast shares recent events or learning opportunities (the session a call out to Fritz Leiber's 1963 Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story of the same name.

Beyond luring in S&S authors like Howard Andrew Jones, Scott OdenJohn R. Fultz, and  Jason Ray Carney, they've got guests covering Movies, Video/Board Games, and Art. We embed three selections here:

Sunday, January 2, 2022

Blood on the Blade - Review by SE


Blood on the Blade by Cliff Biggers

S.E. rating: 4 of 5 stars

Overview: Blood on the Blade (Edited by Jim Beard, John C. Bruening) offers 10 varied S&S tales, several that stick to the tropes (super-charged male heroes takes on evil sorcerers), and several that showcase non-standard milieus (such as Polynesian and Meso-American settings). The subgenre/tones range too, from violent-Grimdark, to light-adventure, YA-fantasy, to humor. I star the ones that I most enjoyed.

The “Scroll of Scribes & Artisans” Afterword offers nice biographies of all the contributors. It’s a great way to amplify a key purpose of anthologies: explore a variety of authors, discover a new one; let it guide you to more of their work.

I learned of this book by following DMR’s blog and publications (https://dmrbooks.com/); he has a nice contribution here. Also, the cover art by Mark Wheatley resonates with the title (and I believe the “GodKiller” opening story).

Some spoilers are below, but I attempt to obscure them

“Godkiller” by Cliff Biggers
Hero vs. sorcerer mayhem. Fast-paced to the point I would have enjoyed the story being longer (i.e., when certain enslaved warriors re-awaken). It’s solid S&S fare with a few memorable writing moments: (1) the hero butchering a priest and (2) learning that the body can be fashioned into weapons.

“The Unlidded Eye” by James R. Tuck
Reads like a Conan pastiche with all its Hyborian Age references. Threok the barbarian is our hero, and the slow-start has a drawn-out, weird-romance with a Prince. Suddenly, the story ramps up so fast it almost stumbles. Uneven pacing, but a satisfying conflict with the god Set. Apparently, Tuck has a book out on this dude: Theok the Indomitable: A Spill of Sorcerer's Blood.

* “The Island of Shadows” by Paul R. McNamee
Starts in media res with two protagonists on a boat (an outrigger actually) so the conflict is not clear. A magical storm get forces them onto a haunted island, so the conflict is not clear at first. The Polynesian milieu was great to be immersed in (ka magic and patu clubs, tiki statues, and puipui skirts). Fun stuff.

* "More Blood" by D.M. Ritzlin
An extended gladiator battle with an overpowered hero (without memory of who is) almost feels like a juvenile attempt at writing fiction, but then the setting clarifies, and the denouement rocked. A fun read brought to you by the champion of DMR books.

"Hounds of Morhullem" by James A. Moore
I’ve had James A Moore’s Seven Forges/Godless books in my TBR for too long. Here we have another duo of protagnists. Valen and the mercenary Berek make a fine pair as they experience an extended battle with undead hounds. It’s fun, but the setup appeared for a goal outside the story; the initial goal is discarded for a battle. Fun, but a sucker-punch for expectations. This must serve as a chapter for a larger series (or the Worthy of King book mentioned in the Afterward).

"The Sorceress Maiz" by Anne Marie Lutz
Vinton and his mother are spellcasters (with royal ties) out to save brother prince from the evil dad-king-sorcerer. There is a ton of sorcery here (paralysis, invisibility, body-switching). The pacing and delivery felt YA-fantasy-ish; the variety complements the other stories. Wish more female writers were out there!

"The Bloody Crooked One" by Charles R. Rutledge
The next overpowered hero is Kharrn. He’s got a big ax and is nigh-indestructible. He teams up with some stray Roman getting slaughtered by a dark-druid, a druid he had dealings with. The plot was supported by ample exposition.

* “Knock the Hell Out of You” by Steven L. Shrewsbury
I tend to roll my eyes anytime heroes enter a tavern, and I tend to like my heroes challenged a lot. In this case, despite the tavern scene and lack of a challenge, it felt fun because it was an over-the-top gorefest. The body-hopping demon fights our protagonists Gorias La Gaul and his daughter, Roan. They make for an interesting pair (there are a bunch of Gorias La Gaul stories elsewhere according to the Afterward). I'm leaning toward tracking these down.

"Dishonor Among Thieves" by Adrian Cole
I’ve enjoyed Adrian Coles's works (i.e. the Dream Lords, and his Elak of Atlantis pastiche), but this was my first exposure to Elfloq, the batrachian familiar. He’s seeking to connect with a bad-arse Voidal sorcerer. Cole already has two short stories about Elfloq in Parallel Universe Publication’s S&S anthologies). This was not classic S&S; it featured our fairy-like familiar Elfloq messing with idiotic mages and barbarians. The humor and tone were a pleasant variation from the others.

"Blood Games in the Temple of the Toad" by Frank Schildiner
The setting shines here, being a Meso-American backdrop. Obsidian Jaguar, a way-overpowered hero, kicks tons of arse. His primary enemies are Caiman (reptile) tribal folk who also have lots of societal issues, including an authoritarian theocracy with a penchant for gladiator fights. I enjoyed the potential here, especially with Clawed Butterfly, a sorceress frenemy. Overall, this felt longer than it had to be, and the plot felt a bit forced.

View all my reviews

Monday, December 27, 2021

Tales From the Magician's Skull Blog - Dec14th-24th Roundup

 Tales from the Magician’s Skull Blog - Dec 14th - 24th Roundup

Bill Ward champions this at: https://goodman-games.com/tftms/



Dec 24 Adventures in Fiction: Fritz Leiber By Michael Curtis
https://goodman-games.com/tftms/2021/...
We’ve talked a lot about Fritz Leiber, whose birthday we’re celebrating today, over the last few years. Leiber, born December 24th, 1910, is most widely known among gamers as the man responsible for the fantastic Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories. In the years running up to DCC Lankhmar, a lot of ink has been spilled discussing Leiber’s most famous creation. Today, however, we’re going to examine some of Leiber’s other work and see how we can apply it to our games—especially DCC Lankhmar.

Dec 21 Classic Covers: Michael MoorcockBy Bill Ward
https://goodman-games.com/tftms/2021/...
With more than a half-century of prolific, diverse, and wonderfully inventive writing in everything from classic sword-and-sorcery to surreal alternate history to sword-and-planet pastiche to counter culture lit fic, Michael Moorcock has seen more editions of his work than you can shake a demon-possessed sword at. And while Moorcock freely hops from genre to sub-genre to whatever-he-feels-like, he seems to have inspired a similar variety of artistic interpretations of his work, sometimes very at-odds with traditional branding, and at others pitch perfect examples of publishing trends. As wild and inventive as his fiction, the following mad collage of images just scratches the surface of the wide array of covers that have helped Moorcock’s books leap from the shelf and into the hands of eager readers since the 1960s.

Dec 20 Adventures in Fiction: Zenith the Albino By Terry Olson
https://goodman-games.com/tftms/2021/...
Many of us come to Gygax’s Appendix N to explore the works that inspired both the D&D of our youth and our favorite fantasy RPGs of today. We read these literary progenitors for both insight and inspiration, and we begin to recognize their themes, plot-twists, villains, and heroes being adapted and personalized by today’s authors. But the writers whom Gary Gygax read were not writing in a vacuum. Surely they were adapting and personalizing the themes, plot-twists, villains, and heroes that they were reading. Who inspired them? Answering this question by reading further back in D&D’s ancestral chain, by going “back to the roots of the genre as deeply as possible” (as Moorcock puts it), is what we call “Appendix N Archaeology.”

Dec 19 Brian Murphy’s Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery By Bill Ward
https://goodman-games.com/tftms/2021/...
In Flame and Crimson (2019) Brian Murphy has crafted no less than the first book length history of the sword-and-sorcery genre, from its origins and antecedents right down to its reflection in the popular culture of the present day. It is a work both indispensable and long overdue, one that fills a gap in our collective bookshelves while establishing an academic and historical baseline for discussion of sword-and-sorcery going forward. But Murphy also accomplishes the most difficult task of all, balancing the need for critical rigor with readability, and the result is a book that not only provides a compelling and comprehensive view of its subject, but is also as fun to read and impossible to put down as the classic stories referenced in its pages.

Dec 18 Adventures in Fiction: Michael Moorcock By Terry Olson
https://goodman-games.com/tftms/2021/...
On the 18th of December, we celebrate the birthday of Michael Moorcock—a big writer with big ideas (regardless of what he thought a handful of decades ago). It’s difficult to rank Moorcock’s diverse achievements in terms of importance or influence. He’s impacted gaming through his Elric stories, he’s been a prolific writer of the Eternal Champion and Multiverse themes, he’s been an influential editor that helped change (dare I say, “improve”) the face of Science Fiction, he’s written comics, and he’s written lyrics for and performed with major rock bands! Perhaps most important of all, he’s inspired generations of great writers, such as Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Thomas Pynchon.

Dec 18 Adventures in Fiction: Sterling E. Lanier By Jim Wampler
https://goodman-games.com/tftms/2021/...
Yesterday was the 93rd anniversary of the birth of Sterling E. Lanier. He wasn’t just a favorite author of E. Gary Gygax, nor was he merely a cited influence on both the Dungeons & Dragons and Gamma World role playing games. For those things alone he would still be notable and of interest to role playing gamers everywhere. Sterling E. Lanier was the quintessential polymath. His personal interests ranged from skin-diving and boating to bird watching and conservation causes. He was also a naval and military history buff.

Dec 17 The Mad Dream Dies: Karl Edward Wagner’s Bloodstone By Bill Ward
https://goodman-games.com/tftms/2021/...
Aliens, lost civilizations, superscience vs. sorcery, perilous expeditions, a warrior maid, sentient crystalline entities, virgin sacrificing witches, bandits, ambushes, teleportation, a magic ring, cosmic visions, possession, a conjured tsunami, desperate battles, a jungle-shrouded city, cross and double-cross, devolved frogmen, a field tracheotomy, wall-leveling green lightning bolts, a world-threatening power, amphibian-crewed hydrofoils, lost tomes brimming with secret knowledge, a reconfigured semi-solid army of the elder dead, and an immortal juggernaut of a man at the lonely center of it all – it’s Bloodstone!

Dec 14 Heroic Fantasy Quarterly’s 50th Issue By Bill Ward
https://goodman-games.com/tftms/2021/...
The Skull and his various minions, flunkies, lieutenants, and, yes, even interns would like to send a hearty congratulations to our sword-brothers over at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, on the occasion of their 50th issue! Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is an online magazine specializing in adventure fantasy of all kinds, from eponymous tales of heroism and epic fantasy, to sword-and-sorcery, dark fantasy, and skulldugging daring-do. If you love Tales From the Magician’s Skull, you’re sure to thrill to our mighty sister publication, who have been in the game for over a decade of consistently excellent fantasy publishing!

Thursday, December 23, 2021

HOCKING's CONAN PASTICHE: Emerald Lotus AND "Black Starlight"; Review by SE

Simulcast on Black Gate


Ken Kelly cover art for Conan and the Emerald Lotus

John C. Hocking's Conan PasticheConan and the Emerald Lotus by John C. Hocking emerged from Tor in 1995 (Ciruelo Cabral cover artist) and reprinted in 1999 (Ken Kelly cover); paperbacks are insanely expensive now (i.e. >$500 on Amazon). Fast forward to 2019, and Hocking released a 12-part serialized novella "Black Starlight" that spanned the recent Conan the Barbarian comic (Jason Aaron)--a direct sequel to "Emerald Lotus" that tracks Conan's adventures as he returns from Stygia.


An indirect sequel novel by Hocking called Conan and the Living Plague was pulled from a 2019 publication at the last minute. Its future is unknown (by certain graces, the author did provide me a copy of the manuscript...and we plan to discuss/share some in an interview planned for 2022).

Setting the Stage with the cover blurb:
(BTW, an astute Goodreads S&S Group member pointed out that there are actually 3 wizards, and this official blurb blends the identity of "Shakar the Keshanian" and "Ethram-Fal")
One wizard is bad. Two are a disaster...And a deadly disaster, too. For Conan, after refusing to help the evil wizard Ethram-Fal, has been cursed with a spell that is slowly, inexorably squeezing the life from his mighty frame. The only person who can banish the spell--besides Ethram-Fal, of course--is the sorceress Zelandra: a raven-haired beauty who practices only white magic...or so she says.

Zelandra has offered to lift the spell from the Cimmerian, if only he will do her one small service: steal the deadly Emerald Lotus from the clutches of Ethram-Fal in his impregnable desert fortress. No good can come of this, Conan thinks to himself. Once sorcery gets mixed up in it, the whole job goes to hell Unfortunately, he's right.

The Prologue: This catalyzes the adventure, defines the conflict, and sets the expectation for substantial horror elements (which the reader gets!). In fact, the titular lotus is both (a) a resource for casting sorcery and (b) a living inhuman-floral creature. Drugs and sorcery are equated, and they are also connected to a vegetable-entity-demon, so the conflict(s) feel very rich, fun, & unique. Sorcerers are addicts!

A moist crackling filled the still air. The corpse jerked and trembled as though endowed with tormented life. Ethram-Fal caught his breath as fist-sized swellings erupted all but instantaneously from the dead flesh of his ap-prentice. The body was grotesquely distorted in a score of places, with such swift violence that the limbs convulsed and the yellow robes ripped open.

Green blossoms the size of a man's open hand burst from the corpse, leaping forth in such profusion that the body was almost hidden from view. Iridescent and six-petaled, the blooms pushed free of enclosing flesh, bobbing and shaking as if in a strong wind. In a moment they were still, and a sharp, musky odor, redolent of both nectar and corruption, rose slowly to fill the chamber.

The Style/Scope: Hocking certainly captured the spirit of REH's fast-paced adventure, and presented the Hyperborean canon/landscape well. Conan's remarkable travel and experiences set him apart from other mercenaries. As he gets embroiled in an adventure, he'll travel across Shem, the river Styx, and into Stygia. There are some greater conflicts teased with Shamtare and King Sumuabi that are introduced but not fleshed out (more on that later).

REH's Conan was essentially all short stories, but novels require longer relationships and here Conan finds himself allied with a team. Conan and the mute Khitan Heng Shih are the two men, and each is loosely paired with a strong-willed woman. The lady on the Ken Kelly cover seems a hybrid of Zelandra (the sorceress with raven hair) with her dagger-wielding attendant Neesa. Conan's warrior skills and knowledge of Stygia are needed to guide them to the ruins of Cetriss. Conan's scouting powers are great with preternatural, and predatorial, eyesight, sense of smell, and instincts:

S&S in Style:
….Where the stream of bubbles had emerged from the pool's floor, a thick shaft of shining green, like the trunk of a tree, now thrust itself into view. It shook, jerked, and stretched itself taller than a man, lashing the water to froth. A cluster of pale, bloated, petal-like growths covered the thing's crown. Its body was a densely wrinkled green cylinder, crisscrossed with pulsing veins. A pair of ridged tentacles burst from each side of its midsection, lashing the air. A thick mass of roiling roots formed its base, heaving at the pool's floor, lifting the grotesque thing up out of the water, moving it toward the shore and the stunned human intruders.

A whiplike tentacle whistled toward Conan, snapping itself around his right calf. It pulled forward with incredible strength, jerking his leg up, upending the barbarian's body, so that for a moment he was suspended head down. The Cimmerian's sword leapt into his hands, making a flashing arc that slashed through the hard, ridged arm and dropped him to the sand.

Heng Shih's hands caught Zelandra's waist and tossed her forcefully back. She stumbled out of range even as a tentacle curled around her bodyguard's torso. The emerald arm constricted, sinking sharply into Heng Shih's abdomen, drawing him in toward the hideous thing.

Conan sprang cat-like up off the ground, ducking beneath one flailing tentacle as another struck him across neck and chest like a slavemaster's whip. He twisted away, stumbling in the sand, a line of dripping crimson bright on his bronzed throat.

The unnatural plant proceeded to pull itself out of the pool on its tangled carpet of roots while bone-white thorns began sprouting from the net of wrinkles on its swaying trunk. Wicked, needle-sharp spikes pushed into view, jutting the length of a man's hand. The unladen tentacles lengthened, whipping wildly about- as the one gripping Heng Shih pulled steadily, tirelessly at him.

The Cimmerian lunged to his friend's aid. A questing tentacle writhed about the barbarian's left arm, biting into muscle and spoiling a stroke meant to free Heng Shih. The tentacle he had severed snaked clumsily between Conan's legs, seeking an ankle.

The Khitan's boots plowed twin furrows in the sandy soil as he was drawn irresistibly toward the thing….
Some of the initial setting begged to be addressed again (i.e., the fate of Conan's mercenary buddy Shamtare and King Sumuabi's need for raising armies), but these are minor threads and happen to be seeds developed in The Living Plague. Although the climax was consistent and action-packed, Conan could have played an even larger role in the resolution.

2019 Conan the Barbarian Comics



"Black Starlight" is the serialized extension of Emerald Lotus. The 12-part episodes published across the 2019 Conan the Barbarian comics picks up directly after the conflict; to clarify, the comics are separate, disconnected story penned by Jason Aaron. With precious little lotus surviving, Stygian liches are desperately trying to steal what little Zelandra has procured. As the party makes its way back to Shem, a fight over it leads the party to an abandoned manor, and a demonic battle. Expect more Hocking pastiche, which always involves a bit of weird-horror:
"No matter." Nubar shrugged the white robes off his shoulders. The barbarian almost lunged, but the hooked blade was back at Zelandra's throat in an instant, and the thing that wore the form of Lord Nubar favored him with a slow and mocking smile. He let the robe fall to his belted waist. His upper body was pale, and the hair on his breast was shot with gray, but he stood straight and there was strength in his shoulders.

With a faint sigh he lifted his arms for a moment, giving Conan a glimpse of long, crimson openings high along his ribs on either side, as open as wounds but not bleeding. Conan saw two horizontal slashes like wide, red-lipped mouths, and each was full of fitfully moving slugs, tiny facsimiles of the winged leeches he and his comrades had faced again and again this hellish night.
Living Plague: Expect coverage on this in an upcoming interview. In short, having read the manuscript, it was designed as an indirect sequel to Emerald. As per the title and blurb, there is a new creature/villain to battle, but Conan's compatriot Shamtare and the location of Akkharia are explored in very satisfying ways.
The long-awaited follow-up to 'Conan And The Emerald Lotus', Hocking once again proves to be amongst the best of the Conan pastiche writers.

Sent to recover treasure from a plague-wracked city, not only must Conan avoid its deranged survivors, but battle a deadly disease given humanoid shape. To save himself - and perhaps the world - he allies with a scheming sorcerer to traverse a demon-haunted abyss in a desperate bid to destroy the Living Plague.

More Hocking
 BTW, Hocking has been cranking out "King's Blade" stories featuring his hero Benhus; these appear in Tales from the Magician's Skull. Highly recommended.

He also had a series of short stories on Brand the Viking. The first “Vali’s Wound” in Daniel Blackston’s anthology Lords of Swords (Pitch-Black, 2004), the second “The Face in the Sea” appeared in Black Gate (2009), and the third “The Bonestealer’s Mirror” in Black Gate (2010).

He also has a few essays out, including "Conan: REH, Conan and Me" in Jason M. Waltz's (Rogue Blade Foundation champion) Robert E. Howard Changed My Life. Here's an excerpt of his 2019 essay that reflects on pastiche:

...I wrote Conan and the Emerald Lotus (1995) for a number of reasons, but foremost among them was a desire to produce my own tribute to Robert E. Howard, Conan, and the Cimmerian’s saga, canonical and otherwise. Naïvely, it never occurred to me the book might be seen as anything but a tribute. It was an attempt, for better or worse, to reflect and celebrate the aspects of the original tales I had most enjoyed and, more often than not, found absent or muted in much modern fantasy adventure.

The book received a mixed response, of course. It appears impossible to find a Conan pastiche that is uniformly appreciated or uniformly scorned. Looking back on Conan and the Emerald Lotus now, 25 years after it was written, I can neither be satisfied with nor dismissive of the book. It is, naturally, down to the individual reader to determine any degree of success the book might have as a novel, a pastiche or just the provider of a few hours of entertainment. However, I do like to think its status as a tribute, as a sincere effort to frame and broadcast my admiration of Robert E. Howard and his immortal Cimmerian, would be apparent to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the prose originals. The book is so saturated with references, connections, tributes and call-outs to REH, the Conan pastiche I most admired, and Howard’s fellow Weird Tales authors that were they to be stripped out of the novel the book would be half its size and nearly incomprehensible. In this way the book is not simply a reaction to Howard and Conan but an expression, decades in the making, of the reaction I initially felt upon encountering “The People of the Black Circle” and the world of reading it threw open for my exploration...




Sunday, December 19, 2021

Annual Anthology Group Read - Jan Feb 2022

 

Join the Sword & Sorcery Group on Goodreads

Jan-Feb 2022 is our annual 2month groupread of Anthologies (and Magazines). All are fair game. Online. Print. Old. New.

Banner Cover Art Credits
Sanjulian - Tales from the Magician's Skull #5
Jim Pitts - Sword and Sorceries #3
Mark Wheatley - Blood on the Blade

Below is a sampling of anthologies being targeted. Feel welcome to add any anthology you plan to read to the "poll" which serves to advertise what is being read or discussed (rather than a "winner").
https://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/2...


Whetstone Amateur Magazine of Sword and Sorcery Issue One by Jason Ray Carney Whetstone Amateur Magazine of Sword and Sorcery Issue Two by Jason Ray Carney Whetstone Amateur Magazine of Sword and Sorcery Issue Three by Jason Ray Carney
Whetstone (Free, online) magazine

Swords and Sorceries Tales of Heroic Fantasy Vol. 3 by David A. Riley Swords & Sorceries Tales of Heroic Fantasy by Editor David A. Riley Swords & Sorceries Tales of Heroic Fantasy Vol 2 by David A. Riley
Swords and Sorceries by Parallel Universe

Renegade Swords by D.M. Ritzlin Swords of Steel by D.M. Ritzlin Death Dealers & Diabolists by D.M. Ritzlin Blood on the Blade by Cliff Biggers
DMR books

Robert E. Howard Changed My Life Personal Essays about an Extraordinary Legacy by Robert E. Howard Return of the Sword An Anthology of Heroic Adventure by Jason M. Waltz Death's Sting--Where Art Thou? by Jason M. Waltz
Rogues Blades Entertainment/Foundation

The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Volume 3, 2013-2015 by Adrian Simmons The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Volume 1, 2009-2011 by Adrian Simmons The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Volume 2, 2011-2013 Best of HFQ Volume 2 (Best of heroicfantasyquartelry.com) by Adrian Simmons
HFQ online or collection

Sword and Planet by Christopher Ruocchio
Sword and Planet due out Dec 21