What have you been reading?

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I finished Dragonflyman & Dragonfly, the prequel to The Wrong Earth. I'm now reading The Wrong Earth. It's a pretty good comic so far.
 
For light entertainment, I’ve lately been reading Heroes of Atlantis and Lemuria, a collection of tales published by D.M.R. Books. It collects Manley Wade Wellman’s stories about Kardios, an Atlantean exile, which were published in the later 1970s. They are slight, but entertaining, tales, and fairly formulaic: Kardios wanders into a new environment, encounters some sort of adversary (a wizard, a monster, a ruler, etc.) which he then overcomes, usually romancing a girl along the way. His weapon is an iron sword (in a Bronze-Age world) which is given a credulity-straining explanation. The final story, “The Edge of the World,” seems to have been inspired to some degree by Dunsany’s “Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean,” though with a very different sensibility.

The book also includes three stories by one Frederick Arnold Kummer (whom I’d never heard of), published in 1939-40. They concern a wandering hero somewhat similar to Kardios, initially named Khor, from Crete, who fights with a great bronze axe. For whatever reason, in the second and third stories Khor has become an American archaeologist named Kirk who somehow can travel back to ancient Lemuria (but otherwise is the same character). These stories have a more realistic setting, if that’s the right word: there is no real magic in them and the cities that Khor/Kirk enters are not as over-the-top in their opulence as in Wellman. The collection finishes with a story by Leigh Brackett, “Lord of the Earthquake,” (1941) in which two archaeologists are drawn back to Mu just at the time of its sinking. It’s minor Brackett, but fairly enjoyable.
 
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Finished Gulag Archipelago. (sweet Galactus... I have no words).

I needed some extreme palate-cleanser.... something fun.

Currently reading all my Grendel Omnibuses. I went full Pokemon an nabbed all 4 plus the Grendel Tales Omnibus 1 and 2.

such fun! It's like reading Evil Detective Batman noir... then suddenly it goes into pre-cyberpunk noir, then Post-Apocalyptic Pulp World of Darkness.

Pre-ordered the new Grendel Prime Odyssey which drops in November.

VIVAT GRENDEL!
If you are into things Grendel, have you tried the telling by John Gardner?


It's a retelling of Beowulf from his perspective. I have read it several times. Definitely worth a try.
 
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If you are into things Grendel, have you tried the telling by John Gardner?

It's a retelling of Beowulf from his perspective. I have read it several times. Definitely worth a try.
It's really good. My wife used to assign it in one of her courses regularly--which, now that I think of it, may not sound like a recommendation. But it's a book you can happily read for enjoyment, not just because someone has assigned it to you.

In the last few days, I've been on something of a Martian kick. I re-read Burroughs' Master Mind of Mars for the first time in decades. It's the tale of another Earthman, Ulysses Paxton (a.k.a. Vad Varo), who is mortally wounded in World War I and finds himself on Barsoom, where he falls into the clutches of Ras Thavas, the titular mastermind. Thavas is a scientist who has found methods of preserving corpses indefinitely without any degradation and transplanting any part (including the brain) from one person to another. Thavas (like others from his home city, Toonol) prides himself on acting entirely from self-interest, without any tinge of sentiment. He mainly engages in medical experimentation, but to pay the bills swaps the brains of the aging rich into younger and prettier bodies, for a hefty fee. Early on in the novel, he does this for Xaxa, the Jeddara of another nearby city, giving her the body of (in typical Burroughs' fashion) the supernally lovely Valla Dia. Paxton/Varo predictably falls in love with Dia (now in the hideous body of the old Jeddara) and embarks on an adventure to get her body back, aided by a famous assassin (whom he revives and heals), a man with half his brain in a Great White Ape, and another victim of Thavas' body-switching trade. I'll let you guess how it all turns out.

Although Paxton is from Earth and therefore shares John Carter's muscular advantage over the Barsoomians, little is made of this in the novel--which was fine with me. Although both cities visited in the book lie in the Great Toonolian Marshes, we don't really learn much about that region of Barsoom. The book did feature a couple elements of Barsoomian culture that I've always found jarring: the prevalence of assassination and the really odd idea that residences (or part of them) will be built to rise up on pedestals at night to avoid assassination attempts. The last element I've always found rather ludicrous, since this is a world where flight is omnipresent, so elevating one's dwelling would do little or nothing to deter killers. And you would think that assassins would be, well secretive men, but the one whom Paxton resuscitates is extremely well-known in his native city, to the point that his face is immediately recognizable to most people there.

Burroughs' own main interest in the novel, I suspect, was making a contrast between a society based on reason and science versus one based on religion. Toonol, the city from which Ras Thavas hails, is supposed to be the former (though Paxton finds it is not, really) and Thavas himself is supposed to be its fullest representative. The other city, Phundahl, is in the grips of a religion which Burroughs goes out of his way to make ridiculous. It involves a lot of meaningless ritual, enriches the priesthood, and teaches in its holy book many things which all other Barsoomians know to be false (like the planet is a flat plate created by their god Tur only 100,000 years ago). The central idol of the cult is an elaborate Oz-like deception, which Paxton and his allies stumble into and exploit for their own ends. All of this is of course in keeping with Burroughs' general approach to religion, but here it is turned up to 11. As usual, it's not hard to see what element of his own time he is attacking--the name of the city gives it away.

I also read, thanks to Hoopla, the second Warlord of Mars: Dejah Thoris omnibus from Dynamite Comics, written by Robert Napton. I can't recommend it, unless you are a real Barsoom completist. The stories, set centuries before Carter's arrival on Mars, are somewhat uninspired, and the art very cheese-cakey (Dejah Thoris wears a thong and nipple covers). You can argue that the nudity is found in Burroughs, but his Victorian sensibilities leave it much more in the background than a comics adaptation must. My main complaint with the books, though, was their lack of imagination in rendering Barsoom. In one early story-line in the collection, Dejah Thoris and a spy from Helium go undercover looking for an assassin. The dive they enters looks just like a bar out of a noir movie, down to people smoking cigarettes--the only difference is the clothing and skin tone. The insides of Martian palaces look just like earthly rooms; instead of sleeping silks people sleep in earth-style beds, etc. I realize that illustrating the story requires inventing many details that Burroughs did not have to specify in prose, but a lot of this seems pedestrian, compared to his often-manic creativity.
 
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Finished Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword this week.
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This is a great blending of English, Norse, and Irish myth into an absolutely brutal tale. I've read a few of his books now - The High Crusade, Tau Zero, and Three Hearts and Three Lions, and this was surprisingly grim in comparison to those. Really enjoyed it though, and he's quickly become one of my favorites of the Appendix N authors.
 
Finished Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword this week.
View attachment 30978

This is a great blending of English, Norse, and Irish myth into an absolutely brutal tale. I've read a few of his books now - The High Crusade, Tau Zero, and Three Hearts and Three Lions, and this was surprisingly grim in comparison to those. Really enjoyed it though, and he's quickly become one of my favorites of the Appendix N authors.
I need to re-read his fantasies. Lately I've been reading some of his early sword-and-planet stuff and enjoying it.

I guess there's some disagreement about whether the original, and rawer, version of The Broken Sword or the later version (the one in the picture, which is also the one I read) is better. Both I think are available these days.
 
I need to re-read his fantasies. Lately I've been reading some of his early sword-and-planet stuff and enjoying it.

I guess there's some disagreement about whether the original, and rawer, version of The Broken Sword or the later version (the one in the picture, which is also the one I read) is better. Both I think are available these days.
Yeah, I read the original, but grabbed the picture of the later version just cause I liked the cover. I feel like the story wouldn't work very well if it were toned down. It really had a classic myth feel to it where terrible things just keep happening and no one seems to have any control on the situation.
 
Did anyone ever get their hands on 'The Bastards and the Knives' by Scott Lynch in ePub or hardcover? After 3 years trying to order the paperback, it has been pushed back again into 2022 instead of release last week.
I am this >.< close to dropping Scott from my Wish List altogether, assume 'The Thorn of Emberlain' is going the way of 'The Winds of Winter', and classify the Locke Lamora books as just a trilogy. :cry:
 
Finished Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword this week.
View attachment 30978

This is a great blending of English, Norse, and Irish myth into an absolutely brutal tale. I've read a few of his books now - The High Crusade, Tau Zero, and Three Hearts and Three Lions, and this was surprisingly grim in comparison to those. Really enjoyed it though, and he's quickly become one of my favorites of the Appendix N authors.

Yeah I love this book, I assume the version I got is the original text as it is quite intense and grim.
 
Yeah I love this book, I assume the version I got is the original text as it is quite intense and grim.
I guess the original also has deliberately archaic language, like always using the word 'glaive' for sword, so that might be another indicator of which one you have. The 1954 original was not reprinted until 2002, I think, by Gollancz. I've only read the 1971 version myself.

For light entertainment, last night I read Frank Cho's Red Sonja: Queen of the Frozen Wastes. I liked it, mainly for the spirit/demon that its Sonja's opponent and for its creative use of Yeti and Neanderthals.
 
I suggest that you have a look for his The Merman's Children, which is excellent, and gives a similar impression of being drawn from real legend and folk lore, but is not so epically bleak and Norse.
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll definitely look for that.
 
Finished Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword this week.

This is a great blending of English, Norse, and Irish myth into an absolutely brutal tale. I've read a few of his books now - The High Crusade, Tau Zero, and Three Hearts and Three Lions, and this was surprisingly grim in comparison to those. Really enjoyed it though, and he's quickly become one of my favorites of the Appendix N authors.
I often marvel that this came out at the same time as The Lord of the Rings. It represents a very different change of direction that fantasy literature might have taken if Anderson rather than Tolkien had been the big new thing.
 
Over the weekend, I finished a collection of Lord Dunsany short-stories, The Last Book of Wonder. It contains little of the secondary-world fantasy which he wrote so well at the beginning of his career--most of the stories are much more tied to our world. Some are still quite good, though. I especially enjoyed "Why the Milkman Shudders, When He Perceives the Dawn," and "How Ali Came to the Black Country," but there are other good tales in the collection as well.

I also read a brief Lin Carter novel--nowadays I think it would categorized as a novella--The Lost World of Time (1969), courtesy of Hoopla. It's hero is named Sargon, so I checked it out hoping it would be set in Ancient Mesopotamia, or some fantasy version thereof. As it turns out, it's a planetary romance set on a mythical '10th planet' from whose fragments the asteroid belt was constructed.

It's a fairly standard sword-and-sorcery story, with a Conan-esque barbarian who helps a fading empire in its struggle against a horde of invaders. The setting does have some non-terrestrial features: people ride dragon-like mounts rather than horses, the main light comes from the planet's moons rather than the sun; the seas glow at night in a milky fashion and the sky is yellow, etc. But for the most part it might as well be Earth in some Hyborian-like era. There are even Robin-Hood-like outlaws and knights as part of the cast.

It was a diverting short read, but nothing special. At the beginning, it seems it will be a science-fantasy work--a message from a long-dead enchanter turns out to be a Hari-Seldon-style recording--but then the magical elements increase considerably. The over-villain, for example, is the son of a Chaos god, immortal (or at least able to live 1,000 years), and 18 feet tall.
 
Re-read all the Kid Sensation books, but two newer ones, going through those now. Going to tackle something else when I get paid and can afford a couple new books.
 
Courtesy of Hoopla, I've been reading parts of The Witch and Warlock Megapack, edited by Lawrence Watt-Evans, and published by Wildside Press. I don't know who thought 'megapack' was a good designation for a collection, but it's basically an electronic anthology of stories (and one novel), mixing some out-of-copyright older material by authors like Elizabeth Gaskell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Lady Wilde, alongside more recent tales. I checked it out mainly for one story, "The Sorcerer Evoragdou," by Darrell Schweitzer, but there are a lot of interesting things in it. A few of the more fantasy or sword-and-sorcery entries (besides Schweitzer's) are Marissa Lingen's "The Six Skills of Madame Lumiere," and "The Justice-Bearer," by Cynthia Ward, and "Small Magic" by Janet Fox.
 
After Toadmaster Toadmaster 's mention of it I reread the second part of the Road to Reality by Roger Penrose. It's great to see Penrose's take on some classic subjects because he views them in a quite different way, encoding that different view in alternate mathematics. Although there's no way his statement that one could read this book without previous knowledge is true, you'd have to read multiple other books over several years to follow him.
 
The fourth book in Ryk Spoor's 'Grand Central Arena' series is out, titled 'Shadows of Hyperion'. I thought I'd re-read the first three books first, though. Which is fine, this is one of the few series I enjoy re-reading. Space Opera in one of the truest senses of the term, and a lot of fun. (I'd found it helps to picture them as anime...which was certainly reinforced by the latest cover.)

Set centuries in the future, most material needs aren't an issue. Invent an FTL drive that works...but lets you know the universe isn't what you thought. Intrigue among numerous alien species, add in as part of the prequel the Hyperion Project, where a group of insanely wealthy and rather twisted individuals created a giant habitat where they could recreate the fictional characters and settings from through history, and then be surprised when the likes of DuQuesne, Seaton, Kirk, Bond, Sun Wu Kung, Sherlock Holmes, and Kim Possible are able to figure out what's going on and stage a revolution. Most are not called by actual name for copyright reasons, which makes identifying them part of the fun. Most died, but some survived to become interesting characters in the books. (The first book, Grand Central Arena, is free for Kindle.)

Over-the-top? Special abilities and powers? A universe-wide mystery? Exploration? Like I said, a lot of fun.
 
Over the weekend, I read Sekenre: Book of the Sorcerer, by Darrell Schweitzer. It's a collection of short stories, published between 1994 and 2004, featuring Sekenre, the protagonist of his fine fantasy novel Mask of the Sorcerer, which I read a little while ago. Unlike the novel, it's only available in paper.

I enjoyed it, as I have everything I've read by Schweitzer. I'm not sure why he is not better known. I don't think the stories are quite as good as the novel with Sekenre, though that is setting a very high bar. There is not as much interesting world-building, for one thing, and the tales are sometimes so strange that I'm not sure what to make of them. Part of the issue is that sorcerers can move through time in complex ways, which makes notions of causality difficult. Beyond that, though, the stories are somewhat, well, disengaged from the imagined world, if that makes any sense? That is, in the novel Schweitzer makes good use of precise and vivid description which makes the reader feel as if he or she is there, seeing what Sekenre sees; there is less of that in the stories.

Some of them also tip over the edge from simply magical or mythical occurrences into stranger and more abstract realms. In "The Giant Vorviades," for example, the titular giant is simultaneously a magical monster, a dream of an almost-dead sorcerer, and a metaphor: the ravages of war can be described as the passage of Vorviades, for instance.

Still, it's quite a good collection of tales, but I'd recommend reading Mask of the Sorcerer first. Oddly, I felt the other way around about Schweitzer's novel The Shattered Goddess and the story collection Echoes of the Goddess; I liked the stories more than the novel.
 
Yesterday I finished L. Sprague De Camp’s Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature. I read an e-book of the Dover 1970 reprint, courtesy of Hoopla; the book was first written in 1948 and published in 1954. So, the book is a bit dated—for instance, De Camp does not seem familiar with the theories about Homer and traditions of oral composition, though these were already pretty well known in 1954. I suspect there are similar issues in his treatment of geology, Mayan history, and a few other matters, though I don’t know enough to say. But these issues don’t really affect the heart of the book.

De Camp provides several things in the work, in greater or lesser detail:
  • An account of the original form of the Atlantis story in Plato and other ancient writers, which is fairly thorough, and a discussion of how and why Plato created the myth, which is naturally more speculative. There is also an appendix providing translations of ancient texts on Atlantis.
  • Some treatment of the way the Atlantis idea has been used by geographers, geologists, occultists, and various enthusiasts, emphasizing the last couple of centuries. This is valuable and, particularly for the theosophists and similar folk, saves the reader the work of wading through their treatises. So much has apparently been written on Atlantis since, say, 1700 that De Camp’s treatment has to be fairly selective, particularly for the earlier ‘scientific’ works exploring the concept. On the other hand, he incorporates some tangential matters, like a discussion of other imaginary communities such as More’s Utopia or Bacon’s New Atlantis (which at least uses the name).
  • A detailed debunking of the way that Atlantis enthusiasts use minor similarities in cultures or languages to argue for a prehistoric Atlantean civilization which influenced various cultures around the world, particularly the Maya (though lots of others have been drafted into the argument as well), and a similar discussion of whether or not a large island could literally sink beneath the waves in a short period of time. For me, these chapters were considerably longer than they needed to be. The ideas are pretty clearly wrong and it’s not difficult to show this. Maybe De Camp felt he needed to argue at length to convince Atlantis enthusiasts, but my guess is that they would not be won over by his reasoning.
  • A final chapter discussing novels that use Atlantis as a setting or element, though there is some mention of these in other chapters as well. This only goes up to 1970, of course. Interestingly, it does not say a lot about the use of Atlantis in pulp SF/Fantasy, though it mentions Howard and Smith. With admirable restraint, De Camp does not even list his own Atlantean fiction.
For my own interests, I would have appreciated more coverage of writings about Atlantis from roughly 1500-1800, when it was still possible to accept and argue for its existence without being something of a crank. But that’s not De Camp’s focus, and, in fairness, it would have been hard for an independent scholar like him to get access to those texts in the 1940s-50s (or 1970s, come to that).

Like Asimov, De Camp writes popular nonfiction at least as well as he writes fiction. His prose is clear and uncluttered and he does a good job of weaving biographical details of some Atlantis enthusiasts into his discussion of their ideas. Among them were intriguing people indeed, like Ignatius Donnelly, a lawyer and politician from Minnesota who wrote an immensely popular and pseudo-learned treatise Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in 1882, as well as books claiming that a comet-strike brought on the Pleistocene Ice Age and another proving by cryptographic means that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare. He also helped found the Populist Party and ran twice for vice-president on its ticket.

De Camp has a keen nose for nonsense and a dry sense of humor, both of which usually serve him well in the book. His accounts of some Atlantis-believers are quite funny, like the Amis d’Atlantis who “broke up a meeting of their rivals at the Sorbonne in 1927 by throwing tear-gas bombs into a discussion of ancient Corsica.” But his sympathy and understanding for those who do not share his pragmatic and materialist views is limited, and limiting. It’s one thing when this is employed against crackpots, but rather another to write of “that pious, imaginative, and rather stupid though talented artist and poet William Blake,” and his “turgid and tedious mass of apocalyptic free-verse.”

One interesting tidbit among many in the book: the name Mu for a lost continent (maybe Atlantis, maybe something else) comes from a mistranslation of a Mayan text, the Troano Codex, made by the eccentric French scholar Charles-Etienne Brasseur in the 1860s. Brasseur thought the document was the description of the destruction of the land of ‘Mu’ by a volcanic eruption or something similar; in fact it is an astrological work.
 
I recently finished a reread of Dies the Fire, a perennial favorite post-apocalyptic novel by S. M. Stirling. It's been a few years since I read it, and I'm happy to report that, despite ballooning into a 15-book epic of increasing silliness, this original still works just fine as a stand-alone.

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The basic premise, to the unfamiliar, is that in mid-March of 1998, a worldwide event eventually known as the Change systematically removes humanity's ability to utilize high technology. At first, the various characters assume there's been some sort of EMP attack; but they quickly realize that not only have combustion engines quit and the electrical grid evaporated; but gunpowder refuses to fire, steam engines won't build up pressure, and even a simple battery-powered flashlight is forever useless. Various hypotheses are put forward as to who or what is the cause of this obviously artificial effect, but at least in this volume no concrete answers are given.

The plot for the most part, follows two separate groups of survivors as they seek to establish themselves in the Willamette Valley. The first is focused on Mike Havel, a former Marine and bush pilot who is in the air with a family of clients when the Change hits. After surviving the plane crash and trek out of the mountains, he and his clients (the Larssons) head for a parcel of land they own that is relatively nearby, along the way linking up with more survivors and eventually developing into a militaristic-tribal culture called the Bearkillers. The second similarly coalesces around a Wiccan priestess and Celtic-folk musician named Juniper Mackenzie, whose efforts to settle her coven on a rural woodlot she inherited mushrooms into a Celtic-style clan system. There are also a number of interludes showing the development of the Portland Protective Association, the neofuedal brainchild of a history professor and SCA enthusiast named Norman Arminger who has the bright idea to recruit gangbangers and outlaw bikers as his feudal underlings and uses the Eye of Sauron as a personal device.

Despite some out-there premises and the high-fantasy weirdness the later books get up to, I find this book a fairly grounded read. I also find it opens itself up to a number of different RPG premises, whether by dropping the PCs into the Change and seeing how well they survive, or using the setting as it is later developed for more conventional RPG activities. There's actually a published adventure for the setting on Drive-Thru, Treasure at the Dalles, but I found it pretty generic and missing much of the books flavor.
 
I've been trying to finish up an old English degree I started almost a decade ago, and one of my courses this summer is on Arthurian Legend. So far we've read The Alliterative Morte Arthure, The Prose Merlin and Suite du Merlin, Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain and excerpts from Wace and some other stuff. Looking forward into getting in Mallory's work.

I also just finished A Little History of Religion by Richard Holloway, which I really enjoyed and am reading my way through Foundations of Practical Magic by Israel Regardie. I'm also still working on his One Year Manuel, and am still stuck on the Rose Cross Ritual step until I get it down more smoothly.
 
Last night—or really early this morning—a skunk sprayed somewhere near my home. The stench was so intense that I could not sleep, even though the windows were closed. So I got up and read for an hour or so, which allowed me to finish L. Sprague De Camp’s The Goblin Tower, the first novel about Jorian of Ardmai. I recently bought a nice used hardback of The Reluctant King, which collects the first three novels of that sequence.

I’m pretty sure that I read it decades ago, but had no memory of it, so it seemed new. It’s an enjoyable, if somewhat slight, tale. Its hero is the king of a city-state called Xylar which ceremonially beheads its monarchs every five years. The book begins with the king’s plot to escape this execution, with magical aid, and then follows his adventures as he completes a geas laid on him by the magicians that abetted his flight. This involves stealing a chest of ancient magical texts and getting them to a wizard’s gathering.

Jorian is a likeable hero. He freely admits to fear and has a habit of drinking and talking too much. He’s quite intelligent, though, and De Camp is usually at pains to show that he wins fights or other contests by out-thinking his opponent, rather than out-muscling them. De Camp also explains why he has the unusual set of skills he does: fighting, acting, thievery and lockpicking, knowledge of several languages, etc. In his years as king, he prepared carefully to escape his own beheading and made a point of acquiring all these skills to help in the endeavor.

Though some of the novel inclines more towards straight action, on the whole it tends to the comedic, and it can be quite funny. Sometimes the attempts at comedy undercut the story, though. For example, some of the fictional societies or institutions in the setting seem more like satires of philosophies or religions than actual examples of them, and other elements are too close to the modern world to be really believable in this fantastic one. The wizard’s conventicle, for instance, is essentially an SF convention in format, even including a costume contest.

De Camp also sometimes makes his characters speak ‘forsoothly,’ using archaic forms like ‘entreat’ for ‘treat’ and ‘or’ for ‘ere.’ That sort of dialogue is very hard to write convincingly and it doesn’t work very well here, IMO, especially when combined with the modernity of other elements in the story.
 
I finished the other two novels in De Camp’s The Reluctant King, The Clocks of Iraz and The Unbeheaded King. The first, in which Jorian travels to the southern kingdom of Iraz (loosely based on Byzantium and Ottoman Turkey) to fix the clock in the local Pharos and then has various adventures, was the stronger of the two. The plot seemed more coherent and the comic elements worked better, in my opinion. The final novel, in which Jorian finally gets back to Xylar to attempt to rescue his wife, was more episodic and had more of the modern-world-in-fantasy-dress elements, which I didn’t find all that interesting. For example, a ruler who has turned his unwanted hunting park into a safari-land zoo, complete with elephants that act as tour-busses and guides with a running patter.

Courtesy of Hoopla, I also read most of David Constantine’s Pillars of Hercules. I ended up skimming over parts; it is a multi-viewpoint novel but ultimately only one of the storylines was very intriguing, so I skipped some sections. It’s an alt-history novel set in a Mediterranean where Athens’ expedition to Sicily succeeded, bringing victory in the Peloponnesian War. Athens went on to defeat Carthage and seize Egypt from Persia, building a great Mediterranean empire. When the novel opens, Alexander the Great has conquered Persia but, at his father’s urging (Philip has survived and is still king in Macedonia) has returned west to fight against Athens.

The main, and more interesting, plot line in the book involves two mercenaries who are hired by Barsine (yes, that Barsine) to accompany her to an uncertain location beyond the Pillars of Hercules, to find something hidden there, before Macedonian agents (including Ptolemy) can find it first. The story also has significant steampunk or clockpunk elements: steam-powered ships (though these are rare), gunpowder (used only as an explosive), Greek fire (turned up to 11), a primitive submarine, etc. Most of these would have been at least theoretically possible in the Hellenistic era, but others go off the deep end, like Alexander’s ‘golems’: mechanical soldiers capable of doing just about everything a human can do and apparently equipped with a significant A.I. There is no explanation for these or suggestion that they are, say, daemons inhabiting metal skeletons.

Generally, there are two different approaches to steampunk (or similar things). In one, the author actually fits the new technology into the earlier era and shows how it would affect that world. In the other, it is just an excuse to have the same sort of machines, or scenes, that would fit into another and very different setting. Pillars of Hercules falls firmly into the second camp. For instance, Aristotle’s daughter Eurydice refits the protagonists’ steamship as a submarine. This seems to be the first one ever built, but some of her pursuers immediately invent depth-charges so that we can have that sort of sub-warfare scene in the novel. Eurydice herself is described simply as a Goth girl, down to the dead white skin and nose-ring, and her dialogue is entirely anachronistic, like “sucks to be them.” Throughout, most of the characters sound like 21st-century people, speaking of “a textbook spec-ops raid,” and similar things.

I will give the author credit for a bravura turn towards the end of the novel, which I will spoiler, since it’s one of the better things in it:
The novel leads us to believe that Barsine’s mission is to find Atlantis somewhere out in the ocean. Along the way, one of the viewpoint characters, a Gaul, gets a lengthy explanation of the fact that the world is a sphere and there is no danger of ‘sailing off the edge.’ But it turns out in the novel that this is wrong: the world is flat and the various parties involved in the chase do reach the edge, where they pilot down a ramp which leads into Hades. There they find (and wreck) a huge simulacrum of the flat earth and planets circling it, which was also apparently a means to control the world.
 
Reading this recent book by Gilbert Herandez reminded me of how much I dig his more surreal work (although I also dig the more downtoearth elements of Love and Rockets).

It inspired me to dig out some of my old Love & Rockets comics and add some of his other non-L&R work, including The Twilight Children which he did with the late Darwyn Cooke, to my wishlist.

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This is designed like the old Ace Doubles, with a different story/novella on each flip side.

Hypnotwist is a wordless, very surreal yet noir, disturbing odyssey featuring one of Hernandez's typically pneumatic heroines. Loved it.

Scarlet by Starlight is a sf fable with a particularly disturbing climax and bittersweet and odd ending.
 
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This morning I finished Lin Carter’s Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria, the first in his Thongor sequence and actually his first published novel, though I read the revised edition of 1969. It’s a short sword-and-sorcery tale that leans heavily on Howard for its barbarian protagonist and on Burroughs for some of its details, like a flying boat (though there is only one). Some of the names of characters sound as though they are from Barsoom, like Thongor’s ally Karm Karvus, and the military hierarchy of otar (captain) and daotar (colonel or general) seems to have been inspired by Barsoom also.

As its title announces, the book is set in the imaginary prehistoric continent of Lemuria, which humanity has wrested from its original rulers, a group of serpent-men (naturally) some thousands of years before. Carter’s Lemuria is a typical sword-and-sorcery land, with high mountains, trackless deserts, and dangerous jungles, as well as human city-states. It is also home to a variety of dangerous animals and monsters, which Thongor battles, when he is not busy dispatching guardsmen or druids. The plot of the novel involves an attempt by the ousted serpent-men to regain control of the continent, with the aid of Chaos gods that have been banished beyond our plane, which Thongor and the titular wizard have to foil.

It’s not bad, but also nothing special, really—the world, events, and characters are about what you would expect. One thing that seems to have given Carter a fair amount of trouble is coming up with good names for beasts. Those he provides are not very attractive: grakk for the ‘lizard-hawk’ (something like a pterodactyl), dwark for the ‘jungle dragon’ (a big carnosaur), and slorg for a kind of serpent with a woman’s head.

P.S.—since my desktop is under repair, I’ve been typing this on my IPad. Its spell-check is overzealous and I’ve had to retype words like grakk repeatedly, since the program wants to make them into some word it recognizes. If there are any weird non-sequiturs in the above, that’s probably the reason.
 
Finished Antonia Fraser's biography of Charles II. Her books are very very detailed, this one is basically 800 pages, but they really are something you can actually read cover to cover instead of being a massive reference tome that sits looming at you.
Charles is a very interesting and open-minded guy for his time as he lived in and sort of embodies a shift in European society from a Medieval to Enlightenment worldview. Also it avoids being a "great man" history as you do get a sense of life in general in England at the time. I'd really recommend it.

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Finished Antonia Fraser's biography of Charles II. Her books are very very detailed, this one is basically 800 pages, but they really are something you can actually read cover to cover instead of being a massive reference tome that sits looming at you.
Charles is a very interesting and open-minded guy for his time as he lived in and sort of embodies a shift in European society from a Medieval to Enlightenment worldview. Also it avoids being a "great man" history as you do get a sense of life in general in England at the time. I'd really recommend it.
I have a copy of that which I received as a birthday present long ago, but I haven't read it in decades. I also have a copy of Tim Harris' Restoration sitting on my shelf that I need to get around to someday.

Over the weekend, I finished Dunsany's Gods of Pegana, which I had been reading a bit at a time. I enjoyed it, but more the earlier sections which describe the gods and their actions, rather than the later ones that focus on the prophets. It's a bit odd that a book which starts with a creation story and genealogy of the gods (so to speak) then treats the religion of the people as entirely a sham. The first and wisest prophet says, 'I know nothing' and later ones simply cater to people's desires or royal edict.

Although Gods of Pegana was the first of Dunsany's fantasy collections to be published, I think, the omnibus I was reading (Fantasy Masterworks Time and the Gods, which has a number of his short story collections in it) places it last. I think that was probably a wise decision, since the book is not quite as readable as some of the later anthologies. His writing seems to have moved from secondary-world stories that are largely mythical in nature to more human-level tales, and then to fantastic stories set in our own world for the most part. Just where along that evolution one's sweet spot lies is a matter of taste, I suppose.
 
Last night I finished Hammerfall (2001) by C.J. Cherryh; I recently bought a used copy. It's good, though I think reading older stuff has spoiled me a bit for longer novels like this (about 440 pages in the paperback), since before c. 1970 or 1980 many SF novels would have been only half that length or shorter.

It's set on a very barren desert planet; its inhabited parts are ruled by an apparently immortal female prophet, called the Ila, whose fortress is in the only real city. Her capital is in the center of one of the worse (though still survivable) regions, and the areas around it are occupied by nomadic tribes. A bit farther off in the lowlands, there are villages built around wells. Some of these had risen against the Ila's rule, but their rebellion failed. All of that is backstory, as is the fact that some people in the world have begun exhibiting a madness that makes them want to travel east and which shows them visions. When the novel opens, Marak Trin Tain, who is son of the rebel leader and also one of the afflicted, has been gathered up with the rest of the 'mad' for transport to the Ila's capital. I won't say more about the plot for fear of spoilers.

The best facet of the novel, IMO, is the desert culture that Cherryh creates and details over the course of the book. We learn a good deal about how the tribal and village societies are organized, what their customs are, and how the Ila controls them. We also encounter the physical features of the desert world and see the sort of survival skills the people have worked out to live there. The plot isn't bad, by any means; just less interesting than the world-building, which is seamlessly integrated into the narrative.

I don't think it's giving too much away to say that the novel involves nanotechnology--the blurb on the book makes this clear, so it's hardly a surprise. Yet the SF underpinnings stay pretty far in the background and the nanites (or whatever) remain on the level of magitech in the book. In fact, Cherryh could have written it as a straight fantasy rather than SF with very few changes, I think. In that way, it reminded me of some of the stories I've read in the last few months from the 1930s-50s, which often give a very vague SF gloss to apparently supernatural things.

There is a sequel, though, and judging by its description and beginning (I checked it out on Hoopla) it appears the series will veer more firmly in an SF direction in that book.
 
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Over the weekend, I read The Caspian Gates, by Harry Sidebottom. It’s the fourth volume in his series about Ballista, a Germanic prince who was sent into the Roman Empire of the third century as a hostage and became a general there. In this volume, after surviving the earthquake at Ephesus in 262 and organizing the defense in that region against Gothic seaborne raiders, Ballista is sent to the Caucasus on a diplomatic mission to oppose Persian influence in the region and rebuild the defenses of a pass over the mountains (the titular gates). The mission is a form of exile, since Ballista is in hot water with the emperor, Gallienus, though the latter is an old comrade.

The book is an enjoyable fast read. Sidebottom is a specialist in Roman history who teaches at Oxford, so he knows the background very well and brings it alive. He is skilled at writing adventure fiction, above all action scenes and military maneuvers. I’ve read the previous three volumes in the series, some years ago, and by my shaky memory this is the best since the first, Fire in the East, which dealt with the siege of Dura-Europos in 256. Or perhaps I just got a bit glutted on the books the first time, and so enjoyed the second and third installments less.

Sidebottom writes scholarly articles and books as well—his Ancient Warfare: A Very Short Introduction is good—but I’d guess that his output in historical fiction is much greater. There are 6 novels in the Ballista series, with another due out soon, 3 in another series set in the crisis of 235-38, and 3 other stand-alone novels. I’ll admit to being a bit surprised that he can get away with it. Academics in English or Language departments of course often write literary and even popular fiction, but it’s rare (IME) for those in other disciplines to write popular fiction, especially if is connected to their research fields. There are exceptions, of course: Deborah Harkness was a specialist in Elizabethan London and John Dee before she started writing the All Souls Trilogy. But I think they are rare. A medieval historian I know who wrote several medievalesque fantasy novels was careful to do so under a pseudonym.
 
Last night I finished Hammerfall (2001) by C.J. Cherryh; I recently bought a used copy. It's good, though I think reading older stuff has spoiled me a bit for longer novels like this (about 440 pages in the paperback), since before c. 1970 or 1980 many SF novels would have been only half that length or shorter.

It's set on a very barren desert planet; its inhabited parts are ruled by an apparently immortal female prophet, called the Ila, whose fortress is in the only real city. Her capital is in the center of one of the worse (though still survivable) regions, and the areas around it are occupied by nomadic tribes. A bit farther off in the lowlands, there are villages built around wells. Some of these had risen against the Ila's rule, but their rebellion failed. All of that is backstory, as is the fact that some people in the world have begun exhibiting a madness that makes them want to travel east and which shows them visions. When the novel opens, Marak Trin Tain, who is son of the rebel leader and also one of the afflicted, has been gathered up with the rest of the 'mad' for transport to the Ila's capital. I won't say more about the plot for fear of spoilers.

The best facet of the novel, IMO, is the desert culture that Cherryh creates and details over the course of the book. We learn a good deal about how the tribal and village societies are organized, what their customs are, and how the Ila controls them. We also encounter the physical features of the desert world and see the sort of survival skills the people have worked out to live there. The plot isn't bad, by any means; just less interesting than the world-building, which is seamlessly integrated into the narrative.

I don't think it's giving too much away to say that the novel involves nanotechnology--the blurb on the book makes this clear, so it's hardly a surprise. Yet the SF underpinnings stay pretty far in the background and the nanites (or whatever) remain on the level of magitech in the book. In fact, Cherryh could have written it as a straight fantasy rather than SF with very few changes, I think. In that way, it reminded me of some of the stories I've read in the last few months from the 1930s-50s, which often give a very vague SF gloss to apparently supernatural things.

There is a sequel, though, and judging by its description and beginning (I checked it out on Hoopla) it appears the series will veer more firmly in an SF direction in that book.
I think my favourite of C.J. Cherryh's is Cyteen. Maybe a little weak in the ending, but it's a taut thriller with o-for-awesome world building and really well done characters. It picked up a lot of well-deserved gongs, including a Hugo and a Locus.
 
I think my favourite of C.J. Cherryh's is Cyteen. Maybe a little weak in the ending, but it's a taut thriller with o-for-awesome world building and really well done characters. It picked up a lot of well-deserved gongs, including a Hugo and a Locus.

40000 in Gehenna was my fav, I think, and Cuckoo’s Egg. I tried my hardest to get through Cyteen but failed. I should try it again…
 
This was an excellent comic by Remy Boydell and Michelle Perez about the life and times of a trans sexworker. Like Boydell's work enough that right after finishing this comic I grabbed her new solo comic 920 London.

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I think my favourite of C.J. Cherryh's is Cyteen. Maybe a little weak in the ending, but it's a taut thriller with o-for-awesome world building and really well done characters. It picked up a lot of well-deserved gongs, including a Hugo and a Locus.

40000 in Gehenna was my fav, I think, and Cuckoo’s Egg. I tried my hardest to get through Cyteen but failed. I should try it again…

I read several of Cherryh's series years ago: all four Morgaine books, the first three Chanur books, the Faded Suns trilogy, and her Russian fantasy trilogy Rusalka, Chernovog, and Yvgenie. But I hadn't picked up any of her books in a long time. I did try to read Downbelow Station back in the 1980s, but bounced off it for some reason.

After finishing Hammerfall I checked out its sequel, Forge of God, via Hoopla. It's a very different book--it begins with a twenty-page or more info-dump explaining all the interstellar history and nanotechnology developments that came before (but scarcely affect the story of) Hammerfall. I may get around to it someday, but it looked a good deal less interesting than the first book.
 
Several years ago I stumbled on the Manifest Destiny comic, which can be summed up as “Lewis and Clark go west and meet monsters.” It was great, and I was disappointed to learn it had been put on indefinite hiatus.

Over the weekend I stumbled on two issues I’d never seen, and discovered the book had started up sometime in the last year.

Unfortunately, the story was terrible, combining “Babies make everything better!” with one of my least favorite bits of poor writing, where characters try to make moral decisions that seem weighty, but they forget the body count the subject of their moralizing has racked up to that point. Given earlier issues had made a point of not shying away from that aspect when it came up, it was especially frustrating.

I don’t think I’ll be expanding my collection of the series any further.
 
Several years ago I stumbled on the Manifest Destiny comic, which can be summed up as “Lewis and Clark go west and meet monsters.” It was great, and I was disappointed to learn it had been put on indefinite hiatus.

Over the weekend I stumbled on two issues I’d never seen, and discovered the book had started up sometime in the last year.

Unfortunately, the story was terrible, combining “Babies make everything better!” with one of my least favorite bits of poor writing, where characters try to make moral decisions that seem weighty, but they forget the body count the subject of their moralizing has racked up to that point. Given earlier issues had made a point of not shying away from that aspect when it came up, it was especially frustrating.

I don’t think I’ll be expanding my collection of the series any further.

I just this morning finished the seventh collection of Manifest Destiny, which collects issues 37-42. I'd guess you found issues 43 & 44? They seem to be the latest to have been published, with two more scheduled for July and August. I have the impression that will be the end of the series.

It's too bad to learn that the title is going downhill. I thought the issues collected in volume 7 were pretty strong, on the whole. The Corps did switch its m.o. from fighting and eliminating all 'monsters' to trying to survive them and move on, but that struck me as reasonable, given that if they kept attacking all of the critters they found it seems unlikely they would make it to the Pacific. The fact that the were-bunnies (so to speak) were human most of the time may have had something to do with the change as well.

Also, as a practical matter, it took Dingess 36 issues to get the Corps to Fort Mandan and November-December 1805. If things had kept progressing at that rate, the book wouldn't have reached the Pacific for another 35-45 or more issues. So on purely narrative grounds, it makes sense to have the Corps stop the recurrent combats and encounters.
 
I read Red Sonja #28, which is the final issue of the current series, published by Dynamite Comics. I was not disappointed.

I've really enjoyed this series. It seems like they had the whole thing planned out ahead of time. There were multiple story arcs, but they all added up to one big, and good, story.
 
Over the last week, I've read the fifth and sixth in Harry Sidebottom's Warrior of Rome (i.e. Ballista) series, Wolves of the North, and The Amber Road. The latter was a good deal better than the former, IMO. In the first, Ballista is sent as an envoy to the Heruli tribe, at this point (c. 263) living in the steppes not too far north of the Black Sea. The book, as usual for Sidebottom, offers some good action scenes and spends a fair amount of time on the Heruli's culture. There Sidebottom pulls out all the stops, accepting the wilder elements of Procopius' ethnography of the tribe some three centuries later and folding in some elements from other Steppe cultures, like the use of cannabis. All that is interesting enough, but Ballista really doesn't have much to do in the novel but observe and react to some events, which is not the best thing in an adventure story. Sidebottom tries to spice things up by including a crazed murderer among the members of Ballista's entourage, who strikes occasionally at the slaves. But this doesn't work particularly well as a mystery--there are only two real suspects--and doesn't add a lot to the book, I found.

The last volume takes Ballista on another mission, this time along the titular Amber route from the Black Sea up to the Baltic, where he is supposed to contact his family in Denmark. His father is a ruler of the Angles there and has been a hegemon in the region, though that position is currently threatened. Ballista is tasked with getting his father to switch sides in the ongoing civil war between the pretender Postumus, who controls most Roman territories North and West of the Alps (and Spain), and Gallienus, Ballista's emperor. This gives Ballista a much more active role than the previous novel and Sidebottom makes good use of the Germanic setting. Generally speaking, there aren't many female characters in this series, but this book includes some of Ballista's female relatives in Denmark and uses them pretty well; the scene of his reunion with this mother after 26 years in exile in the Roman empire is well-drawn.

It's interesting to me how Sidebottom, a specialist in Roman military history, handles Germanic societies in this era. He does not seem that taken with the ethnogenesis approach to Germanic tribes, which has been pretty dominant in the scholarship for the last several decades. His Heruli, for instance, have actually moved as a tribe (or at least as a central clan) from the Baltic to the Black Sea in the decades before the novel begins. And Ballista and other Germanic characters refer to elements of late Norse paganism--or the imaginings of it--that you find in Snorri Sturluson's works composed almost a thousand years after the novels are set. So we have references to Woden hanging on a tree for 9 days and nights, to Fimbulwinter, etc. Of course, since we have almost no evidence on the content of Germanic paganism in this era, there is not a lot else a novelist could do...

Sidebottom is much more insistent on using 3rd-century rather than later material when it comes to archaeology. The appendices to the volumes list archaeological publications for the major sites in the novel and note when (rarely) he has departed from the actual situation. For The Amber Road, his treatment of the Baltic is deeply influenced by some work published in the early 2000s stressing the Roman impact on the region. Fair enough, but I find it a little hard to believe that Ballista's brother, an Angle prince, would have spent much of his time reading Virgil's Aeneid.
 
Just finished John Gwynne's 'Faithful and the Fallen' Pretty standard fare about young lad trains to be a warrior takes on big bad and his armies to free the world and all that. Aside from a twist and some Game of Thrones style big character deaths it was ok but not brilliant. First book was decent start, second... i can't remember what happened only that it took a while to get through. Third was better and picking up and fourth hit the ground running with all the training and getting to know you stuff out of the way. Overall (for the series) 7/10 but not something I'd not seen before in some form.

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Before I found another series to dive into I thought I'd fall back on my old faithful David Gemmell. I've seen descriptions of his books to suggest a lot of them are 'Alamo fantasy' but I never tire of reading and re-reading them. Waylander just whizzes by. I'm sure I could rattle it off in a day unless I drag myself away and it makes me cry inside that the great man never wanted Tv/Film adaptations of the awesome heroic fantasy he created. RIP and thank you DG, your work will always live on whilst I have eyes to read it.

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Waylander, Druss, Jon Shannow and more besides, fabulous books and an easy way to lose an afternoon.
 
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