Pulp Readings: The Spider: Corpse Cargo (1934)

Volume 3, Issue 2 of The Spider magazine (July 1934) is as clear an indication as any that Norvell Page (writing as Grant Stockbridge) is not going to pull any punches with his Spider yarns. His first Spider outing saw kids dying from the bubonic plague unleashed by the villain. In this one, we're only a few pages in when a young member of a club of wannabe Baker Street Irregulars, "The Spider Fan Club," is tortured to death by a gang of modern-day pirates using a knife charged with electricity.

This is part of a larger plot where the gang, led by the beautiful villainess who calls herself Captain Kidd, is using a pulpy invention to electrify rails so that that glow with almost magical "green fire" and electrocute all the passengers of trains so their corpses can be robbed without any witnesses. The trains are sent rolling on to their destinations with no one living on board.

It's a hell of a lurid set-up, and Page is up to the challenge of delivering on it. The pirates set some pretty good death traps for the Spider to have to escape from. There's also a bit of a mystery regarding a kidnapped inventors missing granddaughter that isn't a big point but has a nice little payoff. 

The only thing missing, maybe, is any hint of femme fatale regarding Captain Kidd. The righteous and driven Spider finds her utterly loathsome (and with her disregard for human life, who can blame him!), and though Page says she is attractive, he doesn't give her the sort of loving description a Robert Howard would have.

Get The Spider: The Corpse Cargo here. Tim Truman did a loose adaptation of this story in comics format in the 1990s.

Double Edged Sword & Sorcery

The Double-Edged Sword & Sorcery crowdfunding campaign from Brackenbury Books presents two historical Swords & Sorcery novellas (Waste Flowers and Walls of Shira Yulun) in one hardcover, reminiscent of the style of the old Ace Doubles. I was intrigued by the novels and charmed by the style, and since I knew Dariel from the blogosphere, I reached out to the authors about doing this brief interview.

Thanks to the both of you for doing this! How did you come to be involved with the project?

Dariel: I've been working with editor/publisher Oliver Brackenbury since he launched the New Edge of Sword and Sorcery magazine, for the first several issues of which he solicited/commissioned most of the content. We got to meet through the recommendation of Ngo-Vinh Hoi in the Appendix N Book Club podcast; Hoi mentioned my collection, Swords of the Four Winds, among his recommendations, and that led to Oliver contacting me for an interview on his podcast, So I'm Writing a Novel. 

 At the end of that interview, he invited me over to the Whetstone Discord server. At around the time that I joined, a big discussion had started over what could be done to revitalize the sword and sorcery genre and get new readers in. That led to Brackenbury being tagged to edit and put up a new S&S zine, and I was among the writers who pitched in a story, gratis, for our Issue #0. Brackenbury Books has had several successful crowdfunders since then, lately for NESS 1 and 2 last year, 3 and 4 this year, and an anthology of S&S-meets romantasy, Beating Hearts and Battle Axes. 

 At around the same time NESS 3 and 4 were in production or planning, Oliver had already approached me on an idea to sort of revive the Ace Doubles or do a homage to the Ace Doubles.

Bryn: Like Dariel, I’d written for Oliver Brackenbury’s test issue of NESS, which was put out free in digital and at cost in physical formats. When NESS proved a success, we both went on to write further stories in further issues. There’s a New Edge Sword & Sorcery Discord server where I chat daily, and where Oliver, I guess, lays his evil schemes to expand in sword & sorcery publishing. I said a quick yes, of course, to his first ‘want to write a novella?

I think part of the appeal here is that two-in-one format that does remind fans of the Ace Doubles. So that was the publisher's idea? How do you feel about it?

Bryn: It was Oliver’s idea to put us back-to-back: two tales that kick off from the medieval Mongols and the great Mongol himself, Chinggis or Genghis Khan. Oliver got to know us, know our past work around Mongols, and thought it neat to have "steppe siblings" in a Double. 

I think it works wonderfully well. Dariel and I have similarities, and we have contrasts too – you won’t feel it’s same-samey as you move from one novella to the other, since we have such different styles, but our stance, our position, the kind of thing we are concerned with, have a harmony and common ground. 

We’re both set on the frontiers between the steppe of the nomads and settled societies, with the frontier issues that arose in history – and still arise today. Both of us take a nomad’s perspective on that history. Our heroes may be far apart as people, but each is very conscious – and fired up about! – the encroachment of settled civilizations onto the steppe, the creep of towns and cities into the free grass. I believe sword & sorcery is its most essential self when it sees from the less privileged point of view, which has often been the figure of the barbarian up against the ills of civilization. Both of us give what is resolutely a "nomad’s eye" on the world. If Goatskin and Orhan Timur met, they’d understand one another, they’d thrill to the same call. They’d be steppe brother and steppe sister, too. 

In style, though, you get dishes quite distinct from one another. You won’t be bored. Dariel writes a strong, swift, propulsive story, and lists his influences as Robert E. Howard and David Gemmell: he has everything most classic about S&S, cast into a new sensibility for areas of Asia neglected in fantasy. Me, you can probably tell I’ve loved most a few fringes and odd edges of sword & sorcery, that I am attracted to the rich aesthetics of M. John Harrison’s Viriconium or Tanith Lee’s Tales from the Flat Earth. What excites me most about New Edge Sword & Sorcery and now Brackenbury Books is an openness to innovation within the genre. 

Dariel: I loved all aspects of the doubles idea, of course, so I said yes, I don't think I even asked how much he was going to offer. But Oliver's very decent about that, he credits his parents, both freelance artists, with instilling in him an ethic of making sure creatives get paid their due, so it's a decent deal. Even better, I know from experience Oliver is good and active at promotion, so that level of attention I think makes working with a small press really worthwhile. 

And doing a homage to the Ace Doubles of yore (haha, yeah, I feel old enough to say that!) is a special kick for me. I had quite a few of those, hunted for them in bargain bins all over the seamy side of downtown Manila and the old American airbase in Clark -- back in the 80s they were treasures, as prized as the DAW yellow spines. So given the chance to do that, and with Bryn's work as my novella's companion, it was a golden opportunity. I think Oliver's idea to do a 'steppe siblings' themed set for the first Double Edged book gave it a strong platform, and also fits very much what I want to do with S&S, which is to weave tales about and highlight what I call Forgotten Asia. 

The project looks well on track to fund. What's next for you after that?

Dariel: I'm actually set to deliver two stories, because if we hit at least 250 backers all backers will receive my bonus story, The Shaman's Blood Price. That story is about Orhan and Jungar when they were still young and still brothers - kinda like an Obi Wan-Anakin teamup, and also features their first meeting with the villain of Walls, Qara Erke. As of 16:23 today, Manila time, we’re just thirty backers away from that. And we're already talking about another set of novellas for next year.

I also want to work on more Wali and Khalid stories. These are comical sword and sorcery stories patterned after the adventures of Sindbad. Khalid is dashing, handsome, brave as a lion, swift as a falcon...and thick as a city wall. Fortunately, he has Wali to do the thinking for him. Problem is, Wali is a lecherous failed sorcerer cursed with the body of a monkey! The Wali and Khalid stories are like palate cleansers for me, since I tend to write dark stories otherwise. I'll also be continuing work on my sword and planet novel Warrior of the Lost Age, and in between, tinkering with the Swords of Maruzar RPG and its setting.

Bryn: I hope we fund, because what comes next is highly exciting for me. Oliver has said in public that if this book works out, it’ll be the first of novella series for both characters, Dariel’s Orhan Timur the Snow Leopard and my Goatskin. I’m a slow writer so I am at work well ahead of time. Yesterday I sent Oliver a ten-page outline for the next novella, and today I wrote the first sentences. It has the working title What Rough Beast?, which I’m pretty committed to already. 

Tell everybody where we can see more of your work.

Bryn: My website is Amgalant. That’s mostly about my historical fiction on Chinggis/Genghis Khan, and the research for it. I have a storefront where you can buy direct from me: my historical novels, my Voices from the Twelfth-Century Steppe, an essay on how to listen to the Secret History of the Mongols, my source, and a few short stories. 

Previous Goatskin tales can be found in the pages of New Edge Sword & Sorcery #0 and 1; and in A Book of Blades II from Rogues in the House Podcast. Another is on the way in Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes, an anthology that crosses sword & sorcery with romance, from Brackenbury Books, edited by Jay Wolf. 

Dariel: For my self-published collections Swords of the Four Winds and Track of the Snow Leopard, there's my Amazon page. 

 

 My stories also appear in issues 0, 2 and 4 of New Edge of Sword and Sorcery Magazine, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly issues 7, 54, 58 and 61, DMR Books' Die By the Sword 1, Rakehell Magazine 1, and Broadswords and Blasters 13: Futures That Never Were.

The Adventures of Doc Savage

In 1985, NPR ran a Doc Savage serial in the style of old-time radio. The series adapted two of the original novels by Lester Dent Fear Cay and The Thousand-Headed Man, in 13 episodes. The latter adaptation was done by Will Murray, who has also penned original Doc Savage novels.

The series was released on CD by Radio Archives, but it also appears to be available on a couple of places on the internet, including here.

More Gwelf

Larry MacDougall released another book in his Redwall-esque fantasy series, Gwelf last month. This one is called Gwelf: Into the Hinterlands. In this one, Willburton Fox and his party set out into the North, first the Scrublands, then the dangerous territory controlled by the Ravens and menaced by Rats, Trolls, and the Mange.

MacDougall's art is just as wonderful as the first book, and there is good worldbuilding in the union of the text and pictures.

John Benteen's Fargo

On my recent vacation, I decided to check out the men's adventure paperback series Fargo by John Benteen after discovering the whole series was cheap on Kindle. I became aware of the series thanks to the upcoming graphic novel adaptation, Fargo: Hell on Wheels, by Howard Chaykin.

Amazon bills the series as a Westerns, and I suppose some of them are, in the same way The Professionals (1966) or Fist Full of Dynamite (aka Duck You Sucker) (1972) or other adventure films in Western locales are considered Westerns. They take place in the early 20th Century (1912-1915 in the ones I've read so far) and involve imagery and action out of Westerns (tough men in wild country on horseback with guns), but they involve a range of locales more again to traditional adventure pulp. They range to the jungles of the Philippines and Panama, as well as the more traditional Mexican desert or Yukon.

I've read blogpost reviews that refer to Fargo as sort of a "Western Conan." I can see what they mean in that Fargo is tough as hell, irresistible to women (apparently due to sheer manliness, as he is described as unhandsome and hardly has a scintillating personality), and good at most everything in his warrior and outdoorsman purview. However, Benteen's attention to detail regarding gear and preparation for obstacles his hero faces, and his penchant for pitting Fargo against enemies that appear to be a match for him, serve to make the series feel more grounded and realistic. Only slightly pulpy instead of completely so.

Benteen's prose is lean in the mid-Century way, not pulp purple. His action and dialog are punchy and mostly effective but without any lyricism or descriptive vistas despite their natural locales. Unfortunately, but expected given their genre and when they were written, they carry a streak of misogyny, some of the volumes moreso that others. There is likely some cultural and racial insensitivity lurking in their too, but in the volumes, I have read the narrative is not unsympathetic to both Native Americans and Latinos, and Fargo himself doesn't exhibit any prejudice that I recall--though some of the villainous characters use racial slurs. 

They're all quick reads (under 200 pages) and fast-paced. So far I've read:

• Fargo (vol 1): Set in 1914 during the Mexican Revolution, Fargo is hired to rescue an engineer (and his mine's haul of silver) from deep inside that war torn and escape bandits with revolutionary pretensions.
• Panama Gold (vol 2): A prequel set in 1912. Fargo is asked by Teddy Roosevelt himself to investigate and thwart an attempt to foreign powers to use a mercenary army to sabotage the nearly completed Panama Canal.
• Alaska Steel (vol 3) In 1914, Fargo is hired by a movie starlet to find her wayward husband so he can claim his oil money inheritance. The problem is, he's disappeared in the Yukon where he was seeking his fortune as a prospector.
• Apache Raiders (vol 4) Just started this one, but Fargo is back in Mexico in 1915, smuggling guns for Pancho Villa. Presumably there are Apaches.

Seven Blades in Black

Seven Blades in Black is the first volume of The Grave of Empires series by Sam Sykes. A scarred, gunslinging bounty hunter with a magical sentient gun seeks the vengeance on the seven mages that betrayed her in the war-torn landscape of a country caught between two powers. 

The plot and some aspects of the setting certainly have a classic Western feel to them (and perhaps a bit of Kill Bill), and the guns and devices (including tanks) employed by the Republic have a Steampunk feel to them. For me, what it has the feeling of more than any Steampunk novel, however, is anime. This is mostly in certain aesthetic details. The gun employed by the heroine, Sal the Cacophony, shoots shells of various magical effects like the caster Gene has in Outlaw Star. The mages are classed by the type of magic they employ, and these tend to work like super-powers or special abilities rather than spells. Then there are little aesthetic things: Sal has a signature long scarf. The wind mage has tall spikey hair when "powered up."

Another thing that might be borrowed from anime is the very cinematic approach to action, which there is a lot of, and I think, very well done. This is the heavy worldbuilding sort of fantasy with a glossary in the back, but the setting is well realized, and a lot of interesting details are dropped. Despite my pointing out references or inspirations above, the setting has a number of unique elements. For instance, mages can hear "the Lady's song" when other mages employ magic--the mysterious voice of the goddess magic is derived from. When a mage dies and the Lady takes them, only ashes are left, which are harvested to make magic items like powerful healing spells.

There is a touch of the, well, Whedonesque to the proceedings. Sal's snarky, first-person narration might grate on some readers, and the telling the story to an interrogator frame could feel a bit precious. Both were deficits to me, but more than made up for by the book's strengths. I intend to continue with the series and perhaps seek out other books by Sykes.

Larry MacDougall's Gwelf

 

Gwelf: The Survival Guide (2021) is a gorgeous art book by Larry MacDougall who once upon a time did art for Palladium and Magic: The Gathering. I say it's an art book, because that's what Amazon likely calls it, but in the rpg world it could credibly be called a systemless setting book.

Gwelf is a Medieval(ish) land of anthropomorphic animals. Its author says it's like a cross between Wind in the Willows and Lord of the Rings and that's not just high concept, but pretty much literally the case. Gwelf is the last bit of civilization of the border. It's a place where Otters, Foxes, Badgers, and the sage Sparrows come together peacefully, but beyond the frontier are the Hinterlands where the Ravenfolk hold sway. They're practitioners of dark magic.

This book details the peoples and cultures of Gwelf. There's another book on the way in June, which promises to reveal more about the Hinterlands.

Season of Science Fiction

 Over the past few months, I've been on a science fiction reading kick. Here's most of what I read, leaving out only a few classic short stories from pulp magazines:

The Demon Princes. I listened to the first 2 of Vance's Demon Princes series as audiobooks: The Star King and The Killing Machine. They concern Kirth Gersen and his efforts to bring justice one by one, to the cadre of infamous criminals (The Demon Princes) that massacred his people. These are probably not Vance's best, but middling Vance is still very good. They would have made a very good late 60s-70s sci-fi TV series, I think.

The Sun Eater. This is a multivolume space opera by Christopher Ruocchio. The conceit of the series is a fallen hero, who caused the deaths of billions in destroying a sun to genocide an implacable alien species is relating his life story and how he came to the decision he made. The setting is Dune-esque for the most part but updated to include some more modern post-cyberpunk and transhuman elements. The first novel, Empire of Silence, details Hadrian Marlowe's escape from the future his father has planned and his various travails until he winds up being sent on a mission to find the homeworld of the Cielcin species in hopes of ending their war with humankind.

Howling Dark, the second book in the series, takes Marlowe and his companions out of the worlds of the Empire and into the posthuman societies of the Extrasolarians beyond on a searched for the fabled world of Vorgossos. There they encounter an undying, posthuman king, a character out of their legends, and even greater mysteries.

After that, I checked out some of the short stories he's written in the same setting in the collection Tales of the Sun Eater, Vol. 1, and the novella Queen Amid Ashes from the Sword & Planet. More on that one below.

Sword & Planet. A collection edited by Ruocchio. I haven't read all of it, but most of the stories I have read don't particularly strike me as Sword & Planet--either they are Space Opera and/or Science Fantasy, but I guess they do have swords and planets. Anyway, there is a prequel to Simon Green's Deathstalker series that reminded me of the sometimes goofy but breakneck paced thrills of those books, but DJ Butler's "Power and Prestige" is my favorite. It's a humorous, sort of Vancian Dying Earthish, short dungeoncrawl starring mercenaries Indrajit and Fix.

The Pride of Chanur. I read at least part of this as a kid, but I don't recall if I completed it. In any case, I'm glad I checked it out again. This is the first of group of related novels by Cherryh set in a multi-species Compact and is reportedly part of her large Alliance-Union universe. It concerns the disruption to the political balance of the Compact and to the planetary society of leonine hani after a hani captain, Pyanfar Chanur rescues a member of an unknown species: a human. Cherryh's xenospecies may veer a bit to the anthropomorphic and perhaps monocultural, but their psychologies and cultures are well thought out and interesting and their precarious, barter-based Compact feels much more realistic than any number of feudal kingdoms in space or single galactic governments.

Tar-Aiym Krang. I listened to this as an audiobook and it has the same narrator as the Demon Princes books I listened to, Stefan Rudnicki. It's billed as the second of Alan Dean Foster's novels of Flinx (a young man with psychic abilities) and pet Pip (a poisonous, winged serpent), but it was the 1st actually published. It's part of his larger Humanx Commonwealth universe. Flinx and Pip wind up part of an expedition that takes them off their homeworld of Moth to the ruined world of a long-dead alien species on a search for an ancient artifact. It's short by modern standards, ending pretty much might where a modern novel would be getting started, but there is a sort of naive charm to Foster's world and characters I found appealing.

Oz and the Dying Earth

Driving over the Thanksgiving holiday my family listened to the audiobook of The Patchwork Girl of Oz, and I was struck by how similar Baum's Oz stories are and some of Vance's work, particularly the Dying Earth related material. Some of it, of course, would be resemblances shared with other works of fantasy, but I think there is much more homology of Baum with Vance than say Howard, Smith, or Martin.

I've mentioned before the list of the elements of Vance's Dying Earth stories as outlined in Pelgrane Press' Dying Earth rpg:

• Odd Customs
• Crafty Swindles
• Heated Protests and Presumptuous Claims
• Casual Cruelty
• Weird Magic
• Strange Vistas
• Ruined Wonders
• Exotic Food
• Foppish Apparel

Some of those I think are present in Baum's Oz books, but there are others that have analogs. These are the ones that I think are most prominent:

Odd Customs. In the Dying Earth this relegated to cultural practices. In Oz, the people themselves may be odd not unlike the mythological peoples seem in Medieval or ancient travel tales. Still, the central aspect of using a culture taken to the absurd as an object of satire is present.

Weird Magic. This is all over the place in Oz, with many of the protagonists being products of it. The powder of life made by the Crooked Magician or the "Square Meal Tablets" certainly count.

Strange Vistas. Exploration is as important part of Oz as the Dying Earth. The weird underground world of the vegetable Mangaboos lit by glowing glass orbs in the sky would count, as would the the Land of Naught where the wooden gargoyles dwell.

Ruined Wonders. Oz doesn't have many ruins, but they do have Hidden Wonders, like the city of the China Dolls or the radium decorated city of the subterranean Horners.

Foppish Apparel. It isn't emphasized as much in the text, but it goes through in the illustration...

The other elements are less present in Oz, but Heated Protests/Presumptuous Claims has its analog in humorous exchanges and bickering. Oz isn't as cruel a place as the Dying earth--it shows up in children's stories after all--but it isn't without cruelty. It's a cruelty of the fairytale sort really where axes enchanted by witches might chop off a woodsman's limbs and an evil queen might desire a little girl's head enough to have it cut off.

There are other similarities not really accounted for here. Outlandish, unnatural monsters haunt the wilderness in both (and in both they are often capable of speech). Habitations are separated by wilderness and isolated cultures seem to exist along well-travelled roads. For the most part the societies of both settings seem fairly static (Oz a bit less so than the Dying Earth), in contrast to epic fantasies where world-changing events are part of the narrative. Overall, I think these could be summed up is that both settings seem perhaps descended from fairy stories, Oz more directly, and the Dying Earth through the fantasies of Smith, Cabell, and (maybe) Dunsany.

Some Observations on Science Fiction Names

I think there is a lineage of science fiction name coining that whose progenitor is Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars stories but that passes through early to mid-20th Century pulpier sci-fi like the works of Edmond Hamilton and Jack Vance to the galaxy far, far away of the Star Wars Universe.

In his Mars stories Burroughs went for relatively short (mostly 1-2 syllable), two part, phonetically simple names. Though they don't mostly sound that way to modern ears, I suspect Burroughs was after what he thought of as an "Oriental" feel. They also wind up being very simple for English speaking readers to pronounce. Examples: Kantos Kan, Gan Had, Ras Thuvas, Sab Than, Sojat Yam.

Burroughs uses a not hugely different style in many of his Planetary Romances.

Edmond Hamilton was clearly influenced by Burroughs in a number of ways and the naming practices in several of his works are similar, though they are a bit more phoentically diverse and have more consonant blends. Here are some names from his Captain Future series:  Sus Urgal, Re Elam, Thuro Thuun, Rok Olor, Si Twih, Brai Balt

Typically, he doesn't always try to be so "exotic." Sometimes he seems to be trying to convey future developments of English names. This tact he shares with other writers of the 1940s-1960s, including the various creators of the members of the Legion of Super-Heroes in DC Comics: Irma Ardeen, Rok Krinn, Garth Ranzz, Tinya Wazzo.

Jack Vance tends to take this latter approach in some of his science fiction, too, though his names are more often multisyllabic and have a first-name last name pattern with each name sometimes made up of more than one element. Still, they have a similar vibe I think to the Hamilton and Legion names. These are from the first two Demon Princes novels:  Miro Hetzel, Conwit Clent, Lens Larque, Sion Trumble, Kokor Hekkus, Kirth Gersen.

Star Wars names aren't the product of one individual, though later writers have obviously tried to fit the standards of the original trilogy. There are more straight up English names in Star Wars and of course some pseudo-Japanese ones, but a number could easily have been characters in Captain Future stories, like these: Ric Ole, Sio Bibble, Pondo Baba, Plo Kloon, Nien Nunb, Mace Windu, Sy Snootles.

A Taxonomy of Fantastic Lands

Thinking about the phylogenetic connection between the Lost Worlds of Victorian adventure fiction and the planetary romances of last century led me to an overall classification scheme for all sorts of unusual/fantastic lands or country within large settings (whether that larger setting be an approximation of the real world or a secondary, fantasy world). This was quickly done, so it might bear further though. 

The Strange Country: The Strange Country probably is an outgrowth of The Odyssey and Medieval travelogues. It is a place definitely situated in the wider world and generally not differing in its physical laws but possessed of its least one unusual feature whether than be a geographic anomaly, cultural eccentricity, or weird animal. Most of the various city-states of Barsoom, and the countries of Vance's Tschai or Raymond's Mongo fall into this category. The "Planet of Hats" TV trope is the Strange Country on a planetary scale. The Strange Country differs from the more mundane foreign land by the degree of exaggeration in its unique thing and by the fact that beyond that thing, it isn't usual that foreign in terms of culture, language, etc.

The Lost World: The Lost World is more remote and more divergent from the outside world that the Strange Country. Most often it's an isolated pocket of one or more elements of the world's past, but it could be completely alien. Perhaps its most defining feature is that it is typically a hidden place and is much harder to reach than the strange country. Maple White Land of Doyle's The Lost World is the prototypical example, but Tarzan encounters a lot of these "lost valleys" from Crusader to remnants to lost Atlantean cities. The dividing line between the weirder Strange Countries and Lost Worlds isn't entirely clear, but if the place is widely known to scholars just seldom visited, it's a Strange Country. If no one knew it existed or it was believed to be mythical, it's a Lost World.

Fairyland: The Fairyland is a region defined by its fantasticalness. Physical laws may be very different from the surrounding world. If it has contact with the wider world if is limited and geographical conscribed. Often though, it will be as remote as the Lost World--even more so, perhaps, because it may not strictly be placeable on a map, existing in an extradimensional space. Literal Fairy lands are generally Fairylands, but so is the demonic subworlds of a number of Michael Shea's fantasy novels, Hades in Greek Myth, or Wackyland in Warner Bros. cartoons featuring the Dodo.

Lord of the Rings and the Beginning of "Serious" Fantasy

Hear me out!

I'm aware, course, that there are many works that we would now call fantasy that predate Lord of the Rings, but the conception of fantasy as a specific genre post-dates those works. The conception of fantasy as a genre grew out of fairy stories, and so what I mean here is a work distinct from fairy tale that nevertheless contains the elements of fairy tales: elves, dwarves, dragons, etc. The works of Howard, Smith, and others would be been thought of as adventure stories, weird tales, and the like when first published.

Even still, there are older works that that meet that criteria: MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin, some of Baum's works, and Dunsany's. But all the works I can think of that do they aren't obviously children's works have strong elements of whimsy, irony, and often outright humor. Even Tolkien's own The Hobbit could be so characterized. Lord of the Rings, while not humorless, is much more serious business, though perhaps not as much as Anderson's The Broken Sword, which closely follows it.

Did this seriousness play a role in it's centrality to the emerging genre? I think a bit, though it might be easy to overstate the importance of that one factor. I do think that with Howard and Tolkien sort of being the prevailing template for fantasy has served to influence the tone of a lot of works that followed and the games that inspired them.

Things to Read If the Spirit Moves You

 I've gotten into 2 good fantasy novels with connections to British esoteric spiritual belief at the turn of the 20th Century which are both good reads and good gaming inspiration.

Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi

I've praised Rajaniemi's science fiction work before. Here he goes for an alt-history and alternate physics in a spy-fi story set in 1938 were Summerland (the 4-dimensional space where the dead go) s being exploited with etheric technology and Britain and the Soviet Union are involved in an escalating proxy war in the Spanish Revolution. Behind all that are mysteries regarding the afterlife: where do souls come from? And why isn't Summerland full of ghostly civilizations? (Not all these questions are answered!) The spy stuff reminds me of a couple of novels by Tim Powers (particularly Declare) but the very science fictional rigor applied to the mechanics of afterlife physics is all Rajaniemi's own.

The Revolutions by Felix Gilman

Gilman is another author I've praised previously. In this one, a young couple in Victorian London gets involved in an attempt by a occult cabal's ambitious attempt to visit Mars by means of astral projection, but in doing so they make themselves targets in a magical war being waged between occult societies. One of the highlights here for me is how magic is portrayed in a way that is powerful, but somewhat subtle. A duel between magicians involves bystanders controlled or charmed into hurling insults or punches rather than mages hurling bolts of glowing energy.

Imagining the Hyborian Age

 The map of Conan's world by Katrin Dirim I shared the other day was interesting not just because her her artistic style (though that's great), but because of the way she chose to depict the Hyborian Age costume and material culture. The prevailing style, since the Frazetta covers have been a vague "barbaric fantasy," which each artist working their own variation on the theme.

Howard's stories, by contrast, tend to be much more "historical" in their depiction of these things--though they aren't really consistent in their historical era. Different locales in Conan's world seem to come from different points in history: there are High Medieval tales ("Hour of the Dragon", "A Witch Shall Be Born"), Golden Age of Piracy stories ("Black Stranger"), stories that seem to be set in the ancient world ("God in the Bowl"), and even stories that like ahistorical periods of a Medieval version of the 18th Century ("Beyond the Black River").

I think Dirm's idea to narrow this range a bit to make it make more sense is a good one. On Reddit, she says she capped the level of armor at roughly the early middle ages, and mixed in elements from as far back as the Bronze Age to keep the atmosphere.

I think this fits well with the more "ancient world" interpretation Mark Schultz does in volume 1 of the Wandering Star/Del Rey collection:

Some of the slight re-shifts of the names would be fairly simple. Iranistan becomes the Persian Empire (take you pick which one), and Turan instead of being a stand-in for the Ottoman Turks, are maybe the Parthians? Aquilonia and Nemedian could be recast as somewhat Carolingian Frank:

Though I have seen portrayals (and there is some support for it) that Aquilonia could be Roman!

The Age of Sail stuff in Zingara and the Barachan Isles would require the most change, but there have been pirates as long as there have been boats, so it's possible.

[Book Club] A Dungeon Hiding in Blindsight (part 1)

This is the second in a series of chats between Anne of DIY & Dragons and me about dungeoncrawling (or dungeoncrawling inspiring) science fiction. This installment's topic: Blindsight by Peter Watts.

Trey: So, obviously (like Roadside Picnic) Blindsight isn't strictly a "dungeoncrawl" novel--but I think it has some interesting things that might inform dungeoncrawls.

Anne: It certainly has a section of dungeon-like exploration. And one that's kind of consistent with a scifi mini-tradition of people using clones or backups to explore an alien space so deadly that it requires multiple "lives" to traverse.

Trey: Yes. It's a "killer dungeon" as many sci-fi ones are.

Anne: I'm thinking of Aldis Budrys's Rogue Moon and Robert Silverburg's The Man in the Maze as the earliest examples I'm aware of. But Alistair Reynolds's "Diamond Dogs" novella would be another more recent example. I think I've jumped the gun a bit here though. We should probably say a little more about Blindsight generally before getting into the details.

Trey: Good point! Blindsight concerns what happens after Earth receives an alien visitation (not unlike Roadside Picnic in that regard!), but technology is advanced enough that humans can pinpoint where the visit came from in the edge of our solar system and sends first probes and then a (trans)human team to intercept. What they find isn't some more and fuzzy first contact, but a vast and alien intellect with which no communication is really possible. An intellect that wants humanity dead. It takes a while for the team to piece this together though, but all the while the alien is trying to kill them.

Anne: It's been a few years since I read it, so forgive me if I'm remembering wrong, but the near-lethal dungeon is a kind of trap, isn't it? The alien made something that was almost too dangerous, but just safe enough that the team would give in to the temptation to explore it. And while they're focused on the threat of the environment, the alien intellect is up stuff in the background.

Trey: The alien lives in a high radiation environment so some things are hostile because they just are, but it is effectively experimenting on the explorers. This is killer dungeon where the dungeon and the monsters are inseparable.

Anne: "Inseparable" is a good way of putting it! The amount of connection between the intelligence (which calls itself "Rorschach"), the space the human team is exploring, and the monsters that live inside that space is one of the few things the team successfully learns.

Trey: Yes, it's an interesting concept we haven't quite gotten in dungeon ecology (I don't think). The living dungeon where the monsters aren't just local fauna/flora but essentially cells in a great body. I'm sure someone has suggested that, but I've never seen it actually carried through.

Anne: The dungeon as body of giant monster is more of a scifi concept than a fantasy one, and it does lend itself to drawing on real-world biology as a starting point. The film Fantastic Voyage (with the shrink ray and submarine going inside a human body) is one approach, but it focuses on the sense of wonder, and maybe the didactic opportunity, more than the unsettling or horrific feeling you could get from realizing that the dungeon itself is alive.

Trey: I think it's perhaps rpgs have tended to be rather conservative in their approach to fantasy. From a practical standpoint that presents a low bar to entry, perhaps. There are rpgs with living dungeons though, 13th Age, for instance. Mostly nonbiological but I think there have been a couple of those.

Anne: The Borg Cubes in Star Trek are kind of like living dungeons. I mean, the ships themselves are entirely mechanical, although they function more like bodies than like starships. The Borg themselves are cyborgs, but their bodies seem to be mostly robotic, with only a vestige of biology remaining. In that case, the individual Borg are kind of like cells within the body. 

Trey: Very true! It strikes me that the Rorschach and its cells introduce a way to deal with the problem of the typical, distasteful narrative of dungeoneer in D&D. If dungeons arrive unbidden and spew forth creatures that you can't communicate with and want to kill you, well clearing them out is a bit easier to justify.

It's kind of the premise of my "Apocalypse Underground" series of posts from years back.

Anne: I wonder if that's something that living dungeons often have in common? They represent a threat that almost has to be explored because of the danger it poses. Roadside Picnic's like that too - the Zone appears one night, and everything inside it is contaminated and ruined by its appearance. At least some of the people going in are the ones who were displaced by it showing up.

Trey: That's a good thought. People who are displaced and lose their homes and livelihoods may need what valuables can be wrested from the dungeons.

to be continued

Mothership Adventure Inspiration from the Pulps

The varied worlds appearing in the short fiction of science fiction magazines in the 30s through the 50s have a lot to offer any of the recent sci-fi horror games. Few of these stories are actually horror, but elements of them can easily be viewed through a horror lens. Here are few examples:

"Immortals of Mercury" (1932) by Clark Ashton Smith. Explorers on a tidally locked Mercury have to deal with resentful indigenous people, one a known, primitive, group, and another an advanced subterranean species that would like to wipe humanity off the planet. In many ways, this story is in large part of dungeon-crawl, but the basic set-up could be played all kinds of ways.

"Salvage in Space" (1933) by Jack Williamson. This one is reminiscent of Alien. A down-on-his-luck asteroid prospector finds a derelict ship floating in the Belt and attempts to salvage it. The ship is loaded with jewels, but also taxidermied alien monsters. The crew have all apparently been killed by violence, but the bodies are gone. It turns out the ship had carried an expedition to the Titania, the moon of Uranus, which is covered with "unearthly forests sheltering strange and monstrous life." The miner must discover what happened and find a way to survive the danger still stalking the ship. 

"Parasite Planet" (1935) by Stanley Weinbaum. Weinbaum's Venus is probably the most "ready to be used for horror" setting that isn't already already a horror setting in science fiction. This is how it's described in this story:

A thousand different species, but all the same in one respect; each of them was all appetite. In common with most Venusian beings, they had a multiplicity of both legs and mouths; in fact some of them were little more than blobs of skin split into dozens of hungry mouths, and crawling on a hundred spidery legs. 

All life on Venus is more or less parasitic. Even the plants that draw their nourishment directly from soil and air have also the ability to absorb and digest—and, often enough, to trap—animal food. So fierce is the competition on that humid strip of land between the fire and the ice that one who has never seen it must fail even to imagine it.

Humans have to wear full body suits with respirators least mold spores get into their bodies. And if all that isn't enough it's terrifically hot and humid. "Prospectors" come to Venus to get rich acquiring native plant life with pharmaceutical value.

"Love Among the Robots" (1946) by Emmett McDowell. As the title suggests, this story is light in the way it plays out, but absent the "meet cute" there's an isolated asteroid mining operations with a small human crew testing learning and adapting robots, where the robots begin to gain a bit too much freewill. If it can't be gotten under control, the company will nuke the asteroid.

Pulp Inspirations: Uranus from Captain Future

Uranus figures prominently in the Captain Future story The Magician of Mars published in 1941. Here are some details on Hamilton's version of Uranus, which is not at all scientifically accurate, but very useful for gaming inspiration. Quotes are provided from the issue of the pulp magazine.

Geography

• Mountains are Uranus's best known feature.
• Mystery Mountains: "And there is one colossal range in the northern hemisphere, called the Mystery Mountains, which have an altitude of at least twenty miles and possibly much more."
• "The Mystery Mountains’ eternally cloud-wrapped upper heights have never been explored. It is believed that strange creatures inhabit those lofty hidden heights, since occasionally men have found grotesque bodies floating down the North River that flows from those mountains toward the Polar Sea."
• Meteor Peak: "In the wilds south of Losor is the remarkable mountain called Meteor Peak. It is not a natural mountain like the other peaks of Uranus, but is in fact a huge meteor which fell there in times past and half -buried itself in the ground. Because of its unique metallic nature the meteor did not shatter, and still rises from the wilds as a great, dome-like mass of metal. It has sometimes been used as a quarry for certain metals, but that has now been prohibited."
• Valley of Voices: "...in the Valley of Voices, sheets of a talc-like material exuded from the cliffs seem to have the power of recording in some way any sound vibrations which fall upon them. These queer talc-sheets, whenever the wind strikes them, give forth all the sounds they have “recorded.” The result is that in the Valley of Voices one can still clearly hear sounds and human voices which are echoing after thousands of years."
• Endless River: "It was a foaming river that roared ceaselessly around the planet in the titanic canyon it had eroded for itself, its current being the result of tidal pull of the four moons."
• Shining Sea: "It is a sea whose waters are so impregnated with radioactive material from deposits in its bed that it glows at night like a great lake of light. The Uranian city of Lulanee is built on the shores of the Shining Sea, and is considered by inter- planetary travelers to possess one of the most beautiful settings of any city in the System."
• The Great Caves: "Beneath the surface of the planet is a natural wonder almost as great as the mountains, the great caves of Uranus. The interior of the planet is honeycombed by a labyrinth of caverns unmatched anywhere else in the System...Men have explored some of the upper caverns. There is a tiny amount of light in them, emitted from the radioactive minerals in which Uranus is rich. And there is a whole range of life-forms that exist in the caverns and never emerge into the sunlight."

Lifeforms

• Floating Flowers: "Perhaps the most distinctive plant-life of Uranus are its Floating Flowers — flowers that drift in the air by means of sacs into which pure hydrogen is exuded, and whose trailing air-roots supply them with water and nutrition from the air."
• "The animal life of Uranus is abundant, and comprises many of the most ferocious carnivores in the System."
• Cliff Apes: "are the most dreaded, being not really apes but huge bear-like animals whose six limbs are adapted for clambering over the sheer precipices."
• Cloud Cats: "haunt the cloud-wrapped up- per heights of the peaks, and stalk their prey in the eternal mists."
• Thunder-hawk: "has vast wings which can shadow a whole village and can carry off huge beasts in its claws."
• Harpies: "Their human-like appearance is mere accident, and they are in no way as intelligent as the Qualus, the famous winged men of north Saturn."
• Uranians: "have yellow skins, dark hair, and small, dark eyes." 
• "they are perhaps the most conservative and tradition-ridden people in all the nine worlds. They revere custom, and practice a suave courtesy that most people find rather wearying."
• "they are perhaps the most skilled miners in the System, due to their long acquairitance with the underground labyrinth of their world."
• People of Darkness: "humans of a primitive kind who dwell in the caves and are known as the People of Darkness. They are presumed to be descendants of Uranian stock who ages ago went down into the caves and developed eyesight capable of seeing well there. These People of Dark- ness never appear on the surface. Intense light dazzles them."

Pulp Inspirations

A few passages from science fiction of the pulp era to get the creative juices flowing.

"Carse walked beside the still black waters in their ancient channel, cut in the dead sea-bottom.  He watched the dry wind shake the torches that never went out and listened to the broken music of the harps that were never stilled.  Lean lithe men and women passed him in the shadowy streets, silent as cats except for the chime and the whisper of the tiny bells the women wear, a sound as delicate as rain, distillate of all the sweet wickedness of the world.

They paid no attention to Carse, though despite his Martian dress he was obviously an Earthman and though an Earthman's life is usually less than the light of a snuffed candle along the Low Canals, Carse was one of them.  The men of Jekkara and Valkis and Barrakesh are the aristocracy of thieves and they admire skill and respect knowledge and know a gentleman when they meet one."

- The Sword of Rhiannon, Leigh Brackett

"At the corner gleamed a luminous red sign, “THE CLUB OF WEARY SPACEMEN.” In and out of the vibration-joint, thus benevolently named, were streaming dozens of the motley throng that jammed the blue-lit street. Reedy-looking red Martians, squat and surly Jovians, hard-bitten Earthmen-sailors from all the eight inhabited worlds, spewed up by the great spaceport nearby. There were many naval officers and men, too—a few in the crimson of Mars, the green of Venus and blue of Mercury, but most of them in the gray uniform of the Earth Navy."

- The Three Planeteers, Edmond Hamilton

"Graff Dingle stolidly watched yellow mold form around the stiletto hole in his arm. He smelled the first faint jasmine odor of the disease and glanced up to where the sun glowed unhappily behind a mass of dirty clouds and wind-driven rain.

Dingle kicked morosely at the Heatwave thug left behind to ambush him, and the charred body turned soughingly in the mud. 'Be seeing you, bully-boy, in about five and a half hours. Your electroblast may have missed me, but it cooked my antiseptic pouch into soup. It made that last knife-thrust really rate.'

There was a dumb dryhorn blunder, Graff reflected, sneering at himself out of a face that was dark from life-long exposure to a huge sun. Bending over an enemy before making certain he was burned to a crisp.

But he'd had to search the man's clothing for a clue to the disappearance of Greta and Dr. Bergenson and—even above Greta—the unspeakably precious cargo of lobodin they'd been flying in from Earth.

So I'll pay for my hurry, he thought. Like one always does in the Venusian jungle."

- "Ricardo's Virus," William Tenn

"The small, round metal platform rocked uneasily under his feet. Beyond the railing, as far as MacVickers could see to the short curve of Io's horizon, there was mud. Thin, slimy blue-green mud.

The shaft went down under the mud. MacVickers looked at it. He licked dry lips, and his grey-green eyes, narrow and hot in his gaunt dark face, flashed a desperate look at the small flyer from which he had just been taken.

It bobbed on the heaving mud, mocking him. The eight-foot Europan guard standing between it and MacVickers made a slow weaving motion with his tentacles."

- "Outpost on Io," Leigh Brackett

The Books of Babel

I recently finished reading The Books of Babel tetralogy by Josiah Bancroft. The series was so engaging I plowed through them all, only taking a brief intermission between books two and three to read Watts' Blindsight. The Books of Babel are Steampunkish fantasy, set in the titular Tower, which is something of Big Dumb Object in science fiction parlance.

The series starts with Senlin Ascends where the schoolmaster of a small seaside town and his new bride get separated on a visit to the Tower. I hesitate to say too much regarding the arc of the series for fear of spoiling it, but suffice to say there are multiple ringdoms of almost Vancian cultural eccentricity, Steampunk technology including "cyberware" supplied by a mystery inventor high up in the Tower, air ship pirates, and secrets to uncover aplenty, including the mystery of what the Brick Layer, the head of the Tower's construction, actually intended as its function.

The series has a fair amount bit of humor and the chapter epigraphs from in-world works are often wry, but the Tower is also a rather cruel and violent place at times. Bancroft's narrative doesn't flinch from this or keep the events at an ironic distance. Besides Tom Senlin, the headmaster, there are a number of other viewpoints characters, most of whom are capable women--though there's also a fastidious stag whose brain has been transplanted to a robotic body. But I said I didn't want to give too much away, didn't I? 

Anyway, the series is well-worth checking out, and I think would give a lot of inspiration for rpgs in addition to being a fine read.

Hearing the Owls Hoot in the Day Time

 

Owls Hoot in the Day Time & Other Omens was the title of the 2003 collection of Manly Wade Wellman's John the Balladeer/Silver John stories from Night Shade Books. I have long been a fine of these Appalachian-centered fantasy stories (they were an influence on Weird Adventures). Recently I bought the audiobook of this collection for a work trip. I probably have read these stories in nearly 20 years so it was fun to revisit them and the narrator is just right for the material.