Deep Pulp

Currently, I'm alternating my reading time between two pulp science fiction novels from the 1960s: Lin Carter's Tower of the Medusa and Gardner Fox's Warrior of Llarn. Neither writer is hailed for their great literary accomplishments, though Gardner Fox made substantial contributions to Silver Age comic book history. Both write in a style that harkens back to the days of the actual pulp magazines (which, in Fox's case is where he got his start) and whatever their deficiencies can occasionally turn out a serviceable yarn.

originally published in an Ace Double

Carter has a flare for world-building, if occasionally done in too formulaic and always pretty derivative sort of way. He has a "genius" of combining subgenres that no one had put together before: His Lemuria stories, for instance are basically Conan in a Edgar Rice Burroughs yarn. His Gondwane tales are a faux Vancian mix Oz, Flash Gordon, and the Dying Earth. Tower of Medusa here feels a bit like a C.L. Moore riff in conception: In a future interstellar civilization where less of old knowledge makes ancient tech seem as magic (or maybe it was a fusion of the two?) a tough guy thief and his side kick are coerced into a difficult job: the theft of a jewel called Heart of Kom Yazoth. The story reads more like Moore's husband Henry Kuttner in his early pulp stuff. It has none of Moore's atmosphere. Still, it's an above average Carter effort, I feel like.

Warrior of Llarn is a Sword & Planet yarn. Earthman Alan Morgan gets transport to a distant world by means as yet mysterious. He saves a princess and gets involved with a war between two civilizations. The level of technology of the world is a bit higher than Barsoom, and Fox provides a Dune-esque (a year before Dune) explanation for why people with energy weapons might still use swords. Like Fox's earlier Adam Strange stories for DC, the planet has suffered a nuclear war in the past, which is the cause of it's strange creatures and current lower level of civilization. Fox's story is old fashion, even quaint in many ways, but he's accomplished at delivering the goods. It is not boring.

Planetary Picaresque

We're all familiar with the Planetary Romance or Sword and Planet stories of the Burroughsian ilk, where a stranger (typically a person of earth) has adventures of a lost world or derring-do sort of variety on an alien world. I'd like to suggest that their is a subgenre or closely related genre that could be termed the Planetary Picaresque.

The idea came to me while revisiting the novels in Vance's Planet of Adventure sequence. The first novel, City of the Chasch, is pretty typical of the Planetary Romance form, albeit more science fiction-ish than Burroughs and wittier than most of his imitators. By the second novel, Servant of the Wankh (or Wanek), however, Vance's hero is spending more time getting the better of would be swindlers or out maneuvering his social superiors amid the risible and baroque societies of Tschai than engaging in acts of swordplay or derring-do. One could argue the stalwart Adam Reith is not himself a picaro, but the ways he is forced to get by on Tschai certainly resemble the sort of situations a genuine picaro might get into.

These sort of elements are not wholly absent from Vance's sword and planet progenitors (Burroughs has some of that, probably borrowed from Dumas), but Vance makes it the centerpiece rather than the comedy relief. Some of L. Sprague de Camp's Krishna seem to be in a similar vein.

The roleplaying applications of this ought to be obvious. You get to combine the best parts of Burroughs with the best parts of Leiber. I think that's a pretty appealing combination.

Clankers & Darwinists, Illustrated

I first mentioned the Leviathan series by Scott Westerfield a while back. I just stumbled across a companion to the series The Manual of Aeronautics that is essentially a technical manual to the series, lavishly illustrated by Keith Thompson (who also does illustrations in the novels).

Westerfield's divergent World War I where the Entente Powers are Darwinists (utlizing “fabricated” animals as technology) and the Triple Alliance are Clankers utilizing mechanical technology far advanced of our real history, provided a lot of vehicles and devices for Thompson to illustrate. Here's a German war walker in cutaway Osprey books style:

And here's the British leviathan airship where the heroes spend much of the series:

It also has pictures of uniforms of the major armed forces involved:

It's a great companion if you dug the series and interesting even if you haven't read them books. The only faults I can find with it  is that it is only a slim 64 pages long and it's a portable 7x9 instead of something in more of an artbook 10x12 range.

BleakWarrior

When I encountered Alistair Rennie's "‘The Gutter Sees The Light That Never Shines" in the VanderMeers' New Weird anthology, I knew I wanted more. I tracked down "BleakWarrior Meet the Sons of Brawl" in Weird Tales, but it was still just a tease. Finally, the world has BleakWarrior, a novel-length excursion into the weird, pulpy, lurid, and violent.

In brief: BleakWarrior is less a novel than a series of shorts and vignettes in a fantasy world where a species of of super-powered sociopaths fight Highlander-style for...well, they don't really know. The characters have eccentric names like (The Light that Never Shines or Whorefrost) that sometimes point to their particular schtick, sometimes not. These Meta-Warriors stalk each other and fight to the death and  pursue idiosyncratic schemes and passions, all while dodging/slaughtering/abusing mundane--"linear"--humanity.

The effect of all this is like Masters of the Universe re-imagined by some 2000 AD-bred British writer into an edgy 90s comic. It's got sex, graphic violence, quirky badasses and colorful madmen with slightly silly nom de guerres, black humor, and the occasional faux-Shakespearean soliloquy. It's Sword & Sorcery remade for the post-anime and videogame world.

It will not be for everyone, but if any of  the above sounds interesting to do, then, check it out. Oh, and give Rennie's soundtrack it put together for it a listen. How cool is that?

( my friend Jack of Grotesque & Dungeonesque and I wound up reading it at the same time, so you can head over there and get his take, too.)

Majestrum

Henggis Hapthorn, foremost discriminator (detective) of Old Earth in the far future time of the Archonate, has a problem. Well, perhaps a series of problems. First, there are his cases that may have something to do with a plot to overthrow the government, but perhaps even more troubling is the impending return of a time where "sympathetic association" (i.e. magic) is ascendant over scientific rationality. This problem has been made peculiarly personal for Hapthorn as he shares his brain with another persona, born the magically separated intuitive part of his psyche, and his integrator (a personal AI device) has been turned into a cat-monkey creature familiar. As one might expect, Hapthorn's personal woes and his case are not as separate as they might seem, and he will have to confront further magical forces.

The return of a time where magic works is familiar from games like Shadowrun and Rifts, and even kid's cartoons like Thundarr the Barbarian and Visionaries, but what none of those have is the placement of an ultra-logical, far future Ellery Queen, trying to oppose the coming paradigm shift, which has become a fairly personal affront.

Hughes's universe and his writing style are in a Jack Vance mode. His setting of the Archonate and the Spray resembles Vance's Oikumene and Gaean Reach. It makes his Hapthorn tales something like if Magnus Ridolph or Miro Hetzel was confronting the dawning of the Dying Earth. There is plenty of stuff to borrow for a Vancian science fiction game, or inspiration for a whole setting.

Majestrum is the first Hapthorn novel (though based on how it opens, I suspect some short-stories predate it). There are three others and a short-story collection, all pretty cheap for Kindle.

Weird Cosmoses

The Baroque Space setting I've been occasionally posting on of late draws inspiration from a number of different sources. Here are two I've come across recently that are well worth checking out for rpg inspiration:

I got Brass Sun: The Wheel of Worlds for Christmas. Edginton and Culbard bring us a science fantasy (originally appearing in 2000AD) set in a world that's essentially a giant orrery. It's brass sun starts to die and a young girl has to go on a quest across the worlds to find the key to restart it.

Celestial Matters by Richard Garfinkle is an alternate history hard science fiction novel--though the science is the science of Aristotle! A thousand years after Alexander, the super-powers of Greece and the Middle Kingdom of China are in a protracted war. A scientist from the Delian League commands a daring expedition to fly a spacecraft built from a piece of the Moon through the crystal spheres to get the ultimate weapon, a piece of the elemental fire of the Sun, to defeat the Taoists once and for all.

Tales of the Weird and Fantastic

Just in time for Halloween, Pulp Mill Press has released a second volume of Libram Mysterium edited by Sean Robson, this one subtitled Tales of the Weird and Fantastic. While the first volume was Sword and Sorcery tales, this one focuses on horror and macabre in the pulp vein. I haven't read this one yet, but I'm looking forward to checking it out.

It's available for the Kindle and most other electronic formats.

Hall of Fame

Thanks to Jay at Exonauts! for pointing this out: Leigh Brackett got inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame this year, along with the Frank Frazetta, Olaf Stapledon, Stanley Kubrick, and Hayao Miyazaki. Stellar company, indeed!

Androids & 'Zines

Looking for a little weekend reading? I've got a couple of suggestions:

On the "directly gameable"side, you could do a hell of a lot worse than picking up Tim Shorts's latest issue of The Manor. It's got a brothel locale by Matt Jackson, some clever pairs of rooms that can be stuck into any dungeon by Ken Harrison, and a class and a one shot adventure by Tim. Then, there's that Jason Sholtis cover.

On the fiction (but with game inspiration potential) side, you can do a lot worse than Charles Stross's Heinlein homage, Saturn's Children. It's the twenty third century and humanity is extinct, but their androids are keeping interplanetary civilization going in the solar system in a "something's missing," Toy Story sort of way. There are few android lineages missing something more than the main character Freya and her template sisters, sexbots all. Trying to escape a vengeful aristocrat, Freya stumbles into political games and goes to work for a spy agency (Jeeves Corporation) run by a former gentleman's butler. Jeeves is trying to prevent (maybe) the synthesis of a human by a black lab on the dark edge of the solar system.

This is the first book set in the universe of Neptune's Brood (which I discussed here), albeit in a much earlier era than that later work. There are a lot of cool ideas that could be worked into a science fiction of post-apocalyptic setting including androids or robots--or even a fantasy setting, as my other post discusses. Also, Stross spends a lot of time on the very real difficulties of interplanetary travel that will give you a lot to think about, even if that level of realism isn't typical for games.

Libram Mysterium

Pulp Mill Press just released the Libram Mysterium volume 1, an anthology of pulpy fantasy short-stories. Here's the blurb:

THIRTEEN TALES OF THE WEIRD AND FANTASTIC!

Join vengeance-seeking ghouls in Dylath-Leen; an expedition to the cursed ruins of an ancient city; and a mercenary company with only one criterion for recruits: they must already be dead.

This anthology recalls the pulp fantasy stories of the early- to mid-twentieth century: from pulse-pounding sword & sorcery adventure to chilling tales of the macabre, eldritch horrors, ruthless warriors, and fabulous treasures await within!

Sounds cool, right? I'd be bringing this to your attention even if I didn't have a short-story in it.

It's available in pdf  for $2.99, trade paperback for $14.49, and $15.49 for the trade paperback/PDF combo. Order your copy at DriveThruFiction.

More Weird West

Last year, I recommended Felix Gilman's The Half-Made World and the (free online) short-story "Lightbringers and Rainmakers" set in that same setting. The sequel The Rise of Ransom City brings together the characters in the two previous works to put an end to a disastrous war between the oppressive order of the Line and their steampunkian AI masters, and the violent chaos represented by the Gun and their outlaw agents to whom they granted superhuman abilities.

Rise of Ransom City purports to be the edited form of the autobiography of self-educated inventor Harry Ransom, and so it's first half is his early life and travels in the West. Some readers might become impatient before the dangling plot from The Half-Made World finally surfaces. Still, there's a lot of color and travelogue in the early chapters that might be of particular interest to gamers. We learn for instance that: "Ford was also haunted by a Spirit that resembled ball-lightning and darted up and down Main Street at dusk, causing strange moods in women" and "dope fiends littered the streets of Caldwell, basking like lizards in the summer heat."

We don't get as much insight into the inner workings of the Gun and the Line as we got in the in the first novel, but we get more details about how their viewed by the rest of humanity and how they interact. I wish Ransom had given us more tidbits on infamous agents of the Gun from The Captains of Crime: Their Glorious Lives and Their Ignominious Ends that he reads from at one point.

Cast in Ruin: A Taxonomy of Post-Apocalypses

This week, Charlie Jane Anders wrote an article about the disappearance of the "advanced civilization fallen to barbarism" story that used to be so prevalent in popular genre media. She considers a couple of reasons, one of which is that it has been supplanted by the post-apocalyptic story.  That got me thinking about whether those sorts of stories might be related in some way, and that led me to hypothesize a taxonomy of post-apocalyptic tales.

The first thing to consider is: Did the apocalypse happen to the viewpoint characters or their culture or did it happen to someone else?

Happened to the viewpoint characters/their culture:

If it happened recently you're dealing with a standard post-apocalyptic (or perhaps apocalyptic, if it's ongoing) tale. Examples would include The Walking Dead, I Am Legend, and Night of the Comet, just to name a few.

If it happened in the remote past, then we're dealing with post-apocalyptic fantasy like Thundarr or the Heiro novels of Sterling Lanier. There is a variant where the apocalypse is really slow moving: the dying earth story. It's tempting not to consider these post-apocalyptic stories at all, except for the fact that at least some of them (the Zothique tales of Clark Ashton Smith and The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson, to give a couple of examples) seem very concerned with pointing out how things are winding down to their inevitable end.

Happened to someone else:
If the apocalyptic event happened recently, and the viewpoint characters have arrived to discover this, we're probably dealing with a science fiction mystery or horror narrative. The Star Trek episode "Miri" probably falls into this category. (Some will protest that the apocalypse in "Miri" hardly counts as recent, being hundreds of years ago. I'd argue the extremely slow aging of the surviving children and the resemblance of the fallen culture to the culture of Star Trek's reviewers in the sixties, gives the story an immediacy that it's internal chronology doesn't reflect.)

If the fall is a remote event, then the "civilization fallen to barbarism" story comes into play (showing up in numerous Star Trek episodes like "Omega Glory" and "Spock's Brain" and as a backdrop in a lot of lost world or planetary romance fiction). If the civilization is mostly gone, but it's influence can still be felt, we're probably out of the post-apocalyptic genre and into science fiction, horror or a combination of the two--but not necessarily. The science fiction and/or horror option is exemplified by works like At The Mountains of Madness, Forbidden Planet, Quatermass and the Pit, and (again) a number of Star Trek episodes like "That Which Survives."

The stories in this category I would consider as in the post-apocalyptic genre itself would be of the "cautionary tale" or "sins of the past" sort. Ralph Bakshi's Wizards fits here, as do two unusual, effective, and Oscar nominated Christmas cartoons from MGM: Peace on Earth (1939) and Good Will to Men (1955).

There are less clear-cut stories that are inbetween these two poles. In this group are stories where the relationship of the viewpoint characters (or the viewer) to the apocalypse or the occurrence of the apocalypse, itself, is saved for a reveal at the end. The original Planet of the Apes is a classic example here, but Teenage Cave Man (1958) also fits the bill.

Also, we can place many so-called "Shaggy God" stories here, as the apocalypse leads to an Adam and Eve scenario. The Twilight Zone episode "Probe 7, Over and Out" is practically the archetypal version of this tale, but it has turned up as recently as Battlestar Galactica (2004).

Science Fiction Inspirations

My appreciation for pulp science fiction is well known, but I haven’t recommended any non-pulp stuff in a while, so maybe it’s about time. These are not only good reads, but good gaming inspirations:

The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds by Scott Westerfield form a space opera duology about a struggle between two powers: an empire ruled by the immortal-after-death Risen and the Rix, cybernetic humans who worship planetary-size AIs. The opening battle is much more “hard science fiction” than anything in Star Wars or Star Trek--and all the more  fresh and inventive for it. The Rix, there abilities and goals, are much interesting than the Borg ever were, while filling a similar niche.

Diaspora by Greg Egan is less of an action narrative and not as immediately gameable, but has plenty of interesting elements. In the far future, when the solar system is inhabited by post-humans, a cosmic catastrophe endangers all life. The digital citizens of one polis hatch a plan to escape--to higher order dimensions! Probably the most gameable bits here are the different clades of post-humanity and their societies: the digital polis citizens, the robotic gleisners, the devolved dream-apes.

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi sits between these two. It’s got a bit of Diaspora’s heavy science flights of fancy and post-human setting, but more of the Succession duology’s action and conflict. Jean le Flambleur, the greatest thief in the solar system, is busted out of prison by an Oortian warrior and her intelligent ship. The Oortian’s master has a job for le Flambleur, but first the thief has to retreive his own memories from a moving city on Mars--and match wits with a young consulting detective to do so. The various societies of Rajaniemi’s future are exotic and the technologies presented are really evocative.
 

Monster Mashup

Classic monsters have uses beyond horror (or horror-themed) games. A number of monstrous crossovers in other media show how they can rear their ugly heads in games of other genres.

The astute Marvel reader may be aware that Solomon Kane fought Dracula (Though don't go looking for those stories in any of Marvel's Essential collections. I hear it's in the Dracula Omnibus, though ), but fewer may be aware that Dracula faced Zorro in Old California in a 1993 limited series from Topps. Frankenstein's monster gets around, too.  He encounters Tarzan in a 1996 Dark Horse limited when jungle lord tries to prevent Thomas Edison from recreating Victor von Frankenstein's experiment. (The collection Tarzan: Le Monstre also includes encounters with the Phantom of the Opera and Jekyll and Hyde).

Wold-Newton afficiandos among you that the pulp hero G-8 is rumored to be one of the pilots that took down King Kong. In "After King Kong Fell" Philip J. Farmer suggests that Doc Savage and the Shadow were hanging around that day, too.

Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series is an alternate history where the protagonists fail to defeat Dracula like they did in Bram Stoker's novel, and the count's villainous real estate scheme leads to a vampiric takeover of the British Empire.  The series goes from the 1888 to the 1980s.  Here's a free sample chronicling the vampiric 70s, with a lot of cameos from the likes of Travis Bickle, Shaft and Blade: "Andy Warhol's Dracula."

The monsters needn't be the villains. "Black as Pitch, from Pole to Pole" by Howard Waldrop and Steven Utley takes Frankenstein's monster into Pellucidar. Neil Gaiman's short-story and comic book serial Only the End of the World Again puts Larry (the Wolf Man) Talbot in Innsmouth and pits him against Deep One cultists.

You get the idea. So check out some of these great sources of inspiration in time for Halloween.  Also, take a look at this previous post for more pulpy appearances of classic monsters.

Books That Put the Weird in the West

Here's two book recommendations that bring a little bit of the fantastic into an Old West (or old west type) setting:

I've recommended some of Cherie Priest's work in this vein before--both the Steampunkian Boneshaker and the more horrific historical Those Who Went Remain There Still. Dreadful Skin reminds me more of the latter, though what it reminds me of most is Lansdale's Dead in the West or Collins'  Dead Mans Hand. It's a set of linked short-stories about a former nun pursuing a supernatural menace across Post-Civil War America. It's episodic and none of the stories builds to a climax in quite the way I would have liked, but it's a quick and entertaining read with some nice set pieces: the first story is a cat and mouse game with a werewolf aboard a steamboat trapped by a storm mid-river.

Felix Gilman's "Lightbringers and Rainmakers" is a a free story at Tor.com set in the Western-ish secondary world of his novel The Half-Made World (which I recommended here) and the upcoming sequel The Rise of Ransom City. In brief, a frontier is being made from the more malleable reality of the wilderness, and humanity is caught between two opposing forces: the technologically more advanced, oppressive order of the Line and the violent chaos represented by the Gun. The short story weaves an epistolary tale of frontier towns and confidence hucksters in the rich world Gilman has built.

Summer Reading

I’ve been building up a stack of new fiction that I ought to start getting around to reading. Here are a few I’ve got in the queue. If you’ve read any of them you can let me know what you think I ought to check out first.

My most recent purchase is the new novel by China Mieville. Railsea seems to be a riff on Moby Dick where giant moles are hunted by train on a (maybe) post-apocalyptic terrain crisscrossed by railroad tracks. An interesting setting idea, I think, and Mieville seldom disappoints in that regard.

I picked up Southern Gods by John Hornor Jacobs in Night Shade Books’ sale a few months back, but it had been on my mental list of books to buy for some time. It certainly seems Weird Adventures relevant: A Memphis DJ hires World War II vet Bull Ingram to find mysterious bluesman John Hastur, whose music (broadcast by a pirate radio station) is said to drive men insane and raise the dead.

Snake Moon (also from Night Shade) is by Ray Manzarek, formerly of The Doors. This one may be more Wampus Country that Weird Adventures--though the jacket keeps the plot a bit obscure. It involves a farmer leaving rural Tennessee in 1863, that much is clear. It’s called “a Civil War-era parable of Eden.” It’s got a Mike Mignola cover which probably was the main thing enticing me to by it.

So that’s it for now--though or Goolge+ Pulp Fantasy book club promises to inject some old favorites. And it’s only July.

Titans, Wrathful and Otherwise

 

Based on the previews I was hoping Wrath of the Titans would be a bit better than its predecessor, the 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans. Unfortunately, it largely has the virtues and flaws of the first film. It has a couple of interesting locales (a forest filled with traps and cyclopes, and Tartarus as an ever-shifting labyrinth), but overall it has less spectacle than the "similar in plot but more visually interesting in a stagey way" Immortals (2011).

If you’re looking for rpg inspiration in the area of titans (clashing or wrathful), I’d suggest forgoing all these films and checking out John C. Wright’s fantasy trilogy, "The Chronicles of Chaos" (Orphans of Chaos (2005), Fugitives of Chaos (2006), Titans of Chaos (2007). The series tells the story of five unusual orphans, who have lived their lives as the sole attendees at a British boarding school. It turns out that the five teens aren’t orphans at all, but hostages, securing a truce in the primal war between the Prelapsarian Titans and the Cosmos created by the renegade Cronus. Of course, the teens escape.

The five titan children each wield a different magical paradigm: Quentin practices sorcery and treats with spirits, Colin has the psychic ability to make reality conform to his will, Victor can manipulate matter on a molecular level, Amelia can perceive and tweak higher order dimensions, and Vanity can create doors and has a magic boat. The paradigms (and the paradigms of their foes, the Olympians) act in a “rock, paper, scissors” fashion that is not only clever but eminently gameable.

Wright’s modern world of hidden mythological beings has some resemblance to similar media, but he works with things in fresh ways. Grendel’s mother is the “mother of monsters” Echidna. The master artificer Telchines are more or less robots. The Laegystronians are literally Martians.

While the series seems ready made for something like White Wolf’s Scion (though Wright initially came up with the idea for a campaign in the Amber rpg), there are rich details that could be swiped for almost any game.

Apocalypse Under Ground

He could barely remember a life before the refugee camp. His family had fled there like the others when their village had been overrun. They were without his two sisters; they had been carried away to fill monsters’ cookpots, perhaps. While he spent his days begging for food to feed his family, the monsters took his father, too. Maimed and in constant pain, his father had died with the beak of some leech-thing in his arm—a drug sold to those without hope by agents of the mind-flayers.

If the cleric was to be believed, the monsters took his mother as well. Even then, boy that he was, he knew enough to be skeptical. The wasting sickness that claimed her seemed all too common in the conditions of the camp—gods know he’d seen it enough. The cleric, evangelizing among the refugees, had claimed it was a magical disease sent by the monsters. The clerics always blamed the monsters. Their gods were as hungry for monster blood as the monsters seemed for the blood of man.

The boy didn’t care about the truth. He found a makeshift club, beat some scavenged nails into it, and joined the new crusade. Down he went, with a few veterans but many more hollow-eyed youths, into the lair of the foes of man, into the underground. The boy had survived. He had watched most of the others die in horrible ways: cut down, rended, chewed, dissolved. He had survived.

That was years ago. He barely remembered how young he had been—how weak he had been. Wounds that would have been fatal before now healed within days. He was strong and fast. The underground changed you. The trick was not to change too much. Some scholars thought that many of the tribes of monsters had once been men, in ages past.

Those same sages said it had always been like this. When a civilization mastered enough magic to discover the undergrounds, the war started. Who built them, no one could say. All the beings fighting for them now were like babes crawling through a grand temple in search of a toy. They understood so little. They knew only that there was treasure to be had: the doors in the depths through which the most ancient monsters traveled, the magic they fought over, and the gold that drew the poor and the greedy.

And no one—not goblins, not trolls, not dragons or men—was inclined to share.

The Worlds of Leigh Brackett

Burroughs’s was there first, and C.L. Moore was there first with an anti-hero, but Leigh Brackett made Mars her own. I don’t know why it took me so long, but for my birthday, I treated myself to the second and third Haffner volumes collecting Brackett’s planetary fiction: Lorelei of the Mists: Planetary Romances and Shannach-The Last: Farewell to Mars (the first volume is titled Martian Quest: The Early Brackett in case you were wondering).

Brackett’s most famous creation is probably Eric John Stark--raised Tarzan-like among primitive nonhumans on Mercury.  As a man caught between two worlds, Stark gets caught up in various struggles on the Earth colony worlds of Mars and Venus. Often, like in Moore’s Northwest Smith stories, this involves ancient secrets. Unlike Smith (who just seems lucky to survive the weird horror he encounters), Stark is a more of man of heroic action.

The stories in these volumes take place in the same solar system, but feature protagonists generally less “larger than life” than Stark, though usual just as hard-boiled. Most have the tension of colonizers versus native cultures that underlie the Stark stories. Often the conflict changes both sides.

There's a lot of good game inspiration in Brackett's world-building. There are the colorfu.l gaseous seas of Venus that boats can sail, but in which humans can also breath.  The drug scourge of colonial Mars is shanga--radiation from certain jewels can cause a temporary atavistic transformation. A deep valley on Mercury holds the slowly pertrifiying last survivor of a psychic species.

That's just the beginning.  If you've never read Brackett or you only know her Stark novels and stories, you should check these out.

Art from original pulp magazine

Those Who Went Remain There Still

Three hard-bitten farmers and a spiritualist enter a cave in search of a treasure--and find monsters. It sounds like a zero level D&D adventure, but its actually the capsule description of events in 19th-Century Kentucky in Cherie Priest’s novella Those Who Went Remain There Still.  In place of divine intervention, the ersatz adventurers have got the ghost of Daniel Boone.

The story begins with Boone and a group of trailblazers cutting a road through the wilderness. Along the way they encounter a bird-like creature that terrorizes them by night, snatching men away one by one. This frontier horror tale unfolds interspersed with events in Kentucky of 1899, where the patriarch of two feuding families, the Coys and Manders, has died and estranged family members are summoned back for the reading of his will.

The two stories intertwine, of course. To receive the old man’s bounty, a chosen group of Coys and Manders must enter the forbidding and noxious Witch’s Cave to retreive his will. There, a horror waits that was not truly conquered by Boone and his band over a century before.

Priest weaves a unusual horror tale that is sort of Lovecraftian (in the sense of being firmly rooted in a particular place, and having “normal” men face horrors beyond their understanding) but mixes it with a definite Southern gothic feel. The basic plot could be inspiration for traditional Medieval fantasy, but the whole idea of frontier monster-slaying is perhaps even better.

Check it out!