What have you been reading?

[Lofgeornost]

I haven't posted much since early September, since I've been too busy and off the board. So I have a backlog of pleasure reading to record. I'll start with a couple of novels by John Buchan that I read in the last month or so. He's more famous as a spy/thriller writer, for things like The 39 Steps (which I have to admit I've never read), but he also wrote historical novels. Thanks to the Hoopla app of my local public library, I read his Witch Wood and liked it enough that I sprang for a Kindle version of The Blanket of the Dark--which was cheap, anyway ($2.99, IIRC).

The first of these was Buchan's own favorite among his many novels and, I gather, got a fairly good critical reaction at the time. It's the story of a young Presbyterian minister, David Sempill, newly appointed to small village in the Borders region in the 1640s. He finds by accident that some of his parishioners are practicing witchcraft, which the novel interprets in a Margaret Murray 'ancient fertility cult' way (reasonable enough, given that it was written in 1927). His struggles to suppress this are made more difficult by the fact that leading members of his congregation are involved, and the whole situation complicated when he becomes embroiled (distantly) in the military campaigns of the Earl of Montrose. There is also a romance, of course, although the love interest is the most two-dimensional character in the book. The book assumes you know something about Scottish history in this era and the nature of Scots Calvinism. In part it's a story of the nature of religious faith and the threats of hypocrisy and dogmatism. All that may make it sound impenetrable, but it's actually brisk reading. One barrier is that, though Sempill himself and a few other aristocratic characters speak standard English, many of those in the book use a lot of Scots dialect. The book has a glossary of several pages in the back, but it's useful to read it with access to tools like DSL: Dictionaries of the Scots Language.

The second book, Blanket of the Dark, is almost alt-history--it is the tale of a nonexistent rebellion hatched c. 1536 against Henry VIII. The figurehead of the rising is the (imaginary) son and heir of Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham, whom Henry had executed in 1521. Our protagonist, named 'Peter Pentecost' is thus a descendant of Edward III and has a claim to the English throne. He has been raised in ignorance of this, as an orphan and later poor scholar at Oxford, until the plotters decide it is time to bring him out to lead the revolt. Like Witch Wood, the book is concerned with religion; in this case, the decay of English monasticism, Henry's 'Catholicism without the Pope,' and the arrival of Protestantism from the continent. An interesting element of the story is Peter's connection to an early Tudor underworld of professional beggars, thieves, and mountebanks. There are also some good scenes in which Peter encounters the king himself, although he is somehow able to perceive Henry's place in history in a way that no-one at the time could have done.

I enjoyed both novels. One characteristic of Buchan's writing has special relevance to RPGs, so I'll mention it. He is very interested in depicting geography and physical setting. This is not just a question of describing or evoking a landscape, but of following the precise routes of individuals through it. In The Blanket of the Dark these are all real places, and it's worthwhile to pull out a map and trace the character's movements, especially since at the novel's crisis this is very important. In Witch Wood, however, all the places are imaginary, though I guess inspired by the Borders villages that Buchan knew from holidays as a boy. From what I can gather, Buchan thought such precise geographical detail very significant in fiction and actually wrote an essay about this. Obviously, this is an issue a GM has to wrestle with with an RPG as well; how much such information is helpful in creating an illusion of reality and how much is too much?

 

[Giganotosaurus]

I'm glad you enjoyed it. I've never been able to read it, for odd personal reasons. I knew (vaguely) somebody who taught at the same school as the author, whose real last-name was Trogden IIRC. Said person saw his pen-name as a somewhat cynical bid to cash in on a connection with Native Americans. There was probably some jealousy involved, too, as Trogden/Least Heat Moon went on to make a lot of money while my acquaintance led a life of genteel poverty.

I can't really say much about his last name. In the book he explains that his father was called Heat-Moon, his older brother Little Heat Moon, so he was Least Heat Moon. He does quote from the infamous "Black Elk Speaks" on occasion.
Overall I would recommend reading the book, it's more about Americana and a journey of self exploration than some kind of new age depiction of native Americans.

 

[Lofgeornost]

I can't really say much about his last name. In the book he explains that his father was called Heat-Moon, his older brother Little Heat Moon, so he was Least Heat Moon. He does quote from the infamous "Black Elk Speaks" on occasion.
Overall I would recommend reading the book, it's more about Americana and a journey of self exploration than some kind of new age depiction of native Americans.

Interesting. The tale I heard, which may have been distorted by a degree of snark, is that 'Least Heat Moon' was actually a nickname from his boy scout days or something similar, though Wikipedia claims differently. The same source said that L.H.M. submitted the manuscript for Blue Highways to several publishers under his Anglo name of Trogdon without any being interested. If that's true, I can only applaud him for his ingenuity. It occurs to me that I knew his daughter slightly (I think; it was a long time ago).

Since Witch Wood had revived my interest in the Scottish Border region, I read Michael Scott Rohan’s The Lord of Middle Air, which Gollancz’s SF Gateway makes available quite cheaply as an e-book (~$3). It is set in the Eastern Borders region c. 1230, around Teviotdale and Liddesdale, with some memorable scenes at Hermitage Castle. Its protagonist is young Walter Scot of Branxholme, a Border laird who falls afoul of Nicholas de Soulis, Warden of the East March and a sorcerer. Walter is aided by a distant relative, recently returned to Scotland: Michael Scot, who was a real historical personage—an intellectual, translator from Arabic, and astrologer who served at the Emperor Frederick II’s court in Sicily. After his death in the 1230s, legends grew up about his magical prowess, and Rohan makes use of these, turning Michael Scot into a Merlin-esque figure who guides Walter. Since the book is plot-driven, I won’t say much about its course for fear of spoilers. The story combines elements of action and intrigue—battles, raids, and spying—with expertly-rendered incidents of magic and the supernatural. Michael Scot proves an interestingly complex character and his evil counterpart, de Soulis, makes a good villain. There is even a trip to Fairyland, which is surprisingly Italianate (the physical description of its cities seems drawn from a Giotto painting), though this is also explained.

There is a lot here one could mine for an RPG campaign with a pseudo-historical setting, like Ars Magica. Only one element is notably anachronistic; Rohan’s picture of Border society is clearly drawn from the 16th century, that high point of cattle-raids and reviver derring-do, but transferred back to the 1200s. He justifies this by suggesting it was an immemorial pattern dating back to the Vikings, but that seems unlikely. It would have been interesting to set the tale in the 1500s, with Michael Scot being apparently a distant descendant of the 13th-century figure, only to prove to be the necromancer himself.

I enjoyed the book a lot and am a fan of Rohan’s books in general. I’ve read all of the Winter of the World series and most of the Spiral one. Looking at their publication dates, I found myself wondering why he stopped writing fantasy and SF. All of his books seem to have been originally published between 1983 and 2001 (Lord of Middle Air first appeared in 1994). Rohan was only 50 in 2001 and lived until 2018; it’s a shame he did not write more.

 

[Séadna]

This year I read the Rāmāyana and the Mahābhārata. Here's my thoughts after doing some research on it and trying a few different versions.

Mahābhārata:

For the Mahābhārata the only really complete translation is Bibek Debroy's ten volume set. Debroy is a Sanskrit scholar with an extensive knowledge of the culture the epic was composed in, so I don't think there is any real competitor here:



This epic is several times the size of the Illiad however and needs a good bit more explanation. For preparing for a read I think it's fun to read a kid's version first such as Amar Chitra Katha's graphic novel:



Beyond that DK have published a massive guide to the Epic which is well worth a purchase:



See the interior art:

Spoiler

Finally the most famous section of the epic, the Bhagavad Gita, has been translated incredibly faithfully by Stanley Lombardo. Since this section is sort of a free standing soliloquy it's well worth the extra translation that adopts a separate style to deal with it:



Rāmāyana:

Again the best full translation is Debroy's. The Rāmāyana has hundreds of versions from all over India, however usually the "Rāmāyana" refers to a Sanskrit version written by Valmiki around 300BC. Even here centuries of transmission have resulted in several subversions of Valmiki's version, so Debroy assembles a canonical average of them as such:



However a good primer to the story is Harini Gopalswami Srinivasan's six volume graphic novel:



or even the old 1992 anime:




Again DK have published a guide to the epic that's well worth getting:

 

[JAMUMU]

I used to love the Mahabharata tv show that was on the UK's Ch4 years and years ago.

Just finishing up a read of The Mabinogian (Penguin Classics edition) and I've really been savouring every word. It's a tremendous piece of literature. I want to follow it with something similar, so if anyone has any suggestions for great Celtic literature I might have missed, please let me know.

 

[urbwar]

Added these two story chapbooks to my current rotation:

 

[Séadna]

I used to love the Mahabharata tv show that was on the UK's Ch4 years and years ago.

Just finishing up a read of The Mabinogian (Penguin Classics edition) and I've really been savouring every word. It's a tremendous piece of literature. I want to follow it with something similar, so if anyone has any suggestions for great Celtic literature I might have missed, please let me know.

What Celtic literature have you read so far?

 

[Vile Traveller]

Speaking of Celtic literature, I'm currently breezing through a book of Welsh Fairy Tales, Myths, and Legends by Claire Fayers. Some laugh-out-loud funny moments, and generally witty and not-so-dark as many I've read lately. And I wouldn't worry about the Devil in Wales, he's pretty easy to outwit.

Which is good, because it's Glyndŵr next, and Mrs. Traveller tells me book 2 will have me fuming at the English.

 

[JAMUMU]

What Celtic literature have you read so far?

Ah not so much of it, I'm afraid. A few versions of Gawain & The Green Knight, the Makkars, re-tellings of stories in a couple of old books my grandpa had. Tangential things like the Sagas and Beowulf also. My reading of Irish literature is very limited and in terms of chronology only really starts with POTWW and Ulysses!

Any tips would be gratefully received.

 

[Voros]

I used to love the Mahabharata tv show that was on the UK's Ch4 years and years ago.

Just finishing up a read of The Mabinogian (Penguin Classics edition) and I've really been savouring every word. It's a tremendous piece of literature. I want to follow it with something similar, so if anyone has any suggestions for great Celtic literature I might have missed, please let me know.

Maybe an obvious and dumb suggestion, but have you read Alan Garner's masterpiece The Owl Service? It draws heavily on stories from the Maginogi. There's also a very good if low budget (not that the story requires a big budget) tv adaptation from the BBC in the late 60s.

 

[JAMUMU]

Maybe an obvious and dumb suggestion, but have you read Alan Garner's masterpiece The Owl Service? It draws heavily on stories from the Maginogi. There's also a very good if low budget (not that the story requires a big budget) tv adaptation from the BBC in the late 60s.

No I haven't, though I've heard of it. I'll pick it up with the inevitable Christmas book tokens!

 

[Séadna]

Ah not so much of it, I'm afraid. A few versions of Gawain & The Green Knight, the Makkars, re-tellings of stories in a couple of old books my grandpa had. Tangential things like the Sagas and Beowulf also. My reading of Irish literature is very limited and in terms of chronology only really starts with POTWW and Ulysses!

Any tips would be gratefully received.

"The Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths and Legends" by Peter Ellis is a nice little tome sampling from each of the Celtic areas.

"Welsh Monsters & Mythical Beasts" by C.C.J. Ellis is a cool modern book. There were several compendiums of Welsh folklore written around ~120 years ago that have all seen republishing in the last three years. See:
"Wonder Tales of Ancient Wales" by B. Henderson
"Welsh Folklore: A Collection of the Folk Tales and Legends of North Wales" by Elias Owen
"The Welsh Fairy Book" by WJ Thomas

For Irish stuff specifically I'd try "The Táin" by Ciaran Carson. If you like that continue with "Tales of the Elders of Ireland" by Ann Dooley and "Early Irish Myths and Sagas" by the same Jeffrey Gantz who did the Mabinogi translation you read.

 

[JAMUMU]

"The Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths and Legends" by Peter Ellis is a nice little tome sampling from each of the Celtic areas.

"Welsh Monsters & Mythical Beasts" by C.C.J. Ellis is a cool modern book. There were several compendiums of Welsh folklore written around ~120 years ago that have all seen republishing in the last three years. See:
"Wonder Tales of Ancient Wales" by B. Henderson
"Welsh Folklore: A Collection of the Folk Tales and Legends of North Wales" by Elias Owen
"The Welsh Fairy Book" by WJ Thomas

For Irish stuff specifically I'd try "The Táin" by Ciaran Carson. If you like that continue with "Tales of the Elders of Ireland" by Ann Dooley and "Early Irish Myths and Sagas" by the same Jeffrey Gantz who did the Mabinogi translation you read.

Thank you! My book tokens'll be getting well used this year! This should keep me busy through 2023.

 

[Vile Traveller]

Bloody hell the old PayPal's taking a pounding when I get back from Portmeirion.

 

[Spellslinging Sellsword]

A Celtic Miscellany, Early Irish Myths and Sagas, and the Tain bo Cualinge were all assigned in my Medieval Ireland class back in the 90s. All three are available as fairly affordable Penguin Classics paperbacks.

 

[Lofgeornost]

Thanks to the my local library--and indirectly to John Whitbourn, but that's for another post--I've recently read a couple of books about 17th century England.

One is Charles Spencer's To Catch a King: Charles II's Great Escape (2017), which as the title suggests in an account of Charles' weeks-long flight across England after losing the battle of Worcester in 1651. Charles himself was fond of recounting the story and Samuel Pepys planned to write a book on the subject. He didn't, but his notes survive, as do copies of memoranda given to him by others involved in the escapade. Spencer makes use of these, as well as contemporary pamphlets and news-sheets. He's not the first modern author to write on the subject, and as far as I can see he is not claiming to have any new information or interpretation of events--he's just retelling the tale for a contemporary audience, with more in the way of background and aftermath than most previous accounts.

So this is popular history, in the David McCullough vein, but well-done and quite readable. Spencer is particularly good at set-piece description of striking incidents, like Charles II's death (described in some detail in the final section). The book is most engaging earlier on, when it deals with the first few days after the battle when Charles' fate hung by a thread. The end of the escape is not as thrilling, in part because Charles himself was not much involved in arranging it, but that's not Spencer's fault, of course.

I'm always looking for material that one could repurpose for an RPG in books like this, and it offers a couple:

• It is actually easier for fairly famous people to move about incognito in the premodern world than one might think. Most people had no idea of Charles' appearance, so despite the fact that he was fairly easily identifiable by height (he was 6' 2") he was able to travel around and stay in inns after adopting some rather basic disguises: poor clothing and using soot or walnut juice as a kind of 'instant tan.' One of his sometime companions among the fugitives, Henry Wilmot, did even less; he considered it below his dignity to wear a disguise, and so insisted on dressing and behaving as a gentleman. Charles was apparently fairly good at aping local dialects, but had difficulty in walking like a commoner.
• The number of people involved in getting Charles out of England was quite large; ultimately quite a few people had to be brought in to the project at one time or another. That's rather different than what one might expect. There were attempts to keep the circle of those in the know as small as possible, and many persons involved only had contact with Charles for a brief time, but there were still quite a few who might have betrayed him. And there was a lot of incentive to do so: a reward of 1,000 pounds. But only a couple seem to have tried to sell him out. Of course, part of this was Charles' own status as king, but it was probably important too that he was able to connect to existing networks of people who had become used to keeping things hidden from the authorities: Catholics and Royalists.
• Finally, once Charles was staying in Royalist households, he could trust the masters and owners better than the servants. Indeed, some of the houses sent their servants away on errands or gave them time off when Charles was around, to avoid the possibility that they would report him.

 

[Lofgeornost]

I mentioned in the last post I'd read two books on the 17th century; the second is a novel, Robert Harris' Act of Oblivion, which I checked out recently from the local library. Harris is a well-known thriller writer, and very good at it, in my opinion. He's also written some historical novels, including a fun trilogy of books about Cicero and the end of the Roman Republic, and the less successful (but still readable) Pompeii.

This book focuses on the search for Charles I's killers launched by the Charles II's government after the Restoration, and especially the hunt for two who had escaped to America: Edward Wharton, commissary-general of Cromwell's cavalry and his cousin to boot, and William Goffe, a Puritan firebrand and Wharton's son-in-law. Both men had signed Charles II's death warrant and were thus on the list for execution. I know nothing about their case, though I gather there have been a couple of fairly recent nonfiction books about the search for them. Harris notes that he has been faithful to the historical record, though of course inventing much where we have no direct evidence. The major fictional element is the chief manhunter himself; for that position, Harris has created a Royalist named Nayler who has personal reasons to want Wharton and Goffe found.

The tale is more than just the search for Wharton and Goffe; there are scenes in England and on the continent, as Nayler orchestrates the capture or assassination of some other regicides, and some chapters focus on Wharton and Goffe's family who remained in England, or on Wharton's reminiscences of the English Civil War. The story is most gripping up through the officially-sanctioned expedition to find the two fugitives, which makes its way from Boston to Connecticut and then New Haven (at that point an independent colony) and the New Netherlands. After that, the heat is off, to some degree, and the story becomes less tense, though this is not Harris's fault, of course. He does supply a rather cinematic and conjectural ending to the tale--we don't really know what happened to William Goffe.

The experience of these two fugitives, as Harris retells it, could scarcely be more different than that of Charles II in his flight from Worcester. Their situations in some ways seem identical--on the run, with large prices on their heads, but with those around them who are willing to hide and protect them. But while Charles generally moved around rather freely, albeit in disguise, Wharton and Goffe (after a brief period of living openly under their own names in Cambridge, MA), largely lived in hiding; with some periods in the wilderness and most time spent (rather Anne Frank-like) staying secretly in people's homes or cellars, coming out only at night. In a way, traveling to the Americas was a considerable mistake for them; since the population of the English colonies was so small at this point, strangers tended to stand out. They would have been better off heading for Germany (as some other regicides did).

 

[Séadna]

Ehm, for AsenRG only basically. My favourite historical novel in Irish has been translated into Bulgarian. An Litir (The Letter) is now Писмото:

 

[AsenRG]

Ehm, for AsenRG only basically. My favourite historical novel in Irish has been translated into Bulgarian. An Litir (The Letter) is now Писмото:

View attachment 53330

I have to visit the bookstore tomorrow, thank you!

 

[urbwar]

I finished that Pro Se Presents, and bought the next one, as one story continued into the next issue:

I also have been reading some short fiction that was posted to Shoggoth.net. They've had some new material posted this month, and I sent the various stories to my kindle using the browser extension. Read 3 or 4 of them so far. Interesting mix of fiction presented.

 

[Lofgeornost]

This fall I've read several novels by John Whitbourn, courtesy of Kindle and the Gollancz SF Gateway. They sell e-books of his novels for a song--usually about $1.99. He's an English author, and I don't think his books have been published in paper in the U.S.

As it turns out, Whitbourn is (or was) also a gamer. He was a wargamer (miniatures gamer to us Yanks) and early RPG player, writing and running his own RPG, titled Continuum (not the published one from the 1990s). In an interesting interview from the San Antonio Review, which you can read here he credits M.A.R. Barker and Tekumel as inspirations for his own work, though in terms of depth of world-building, not specific details.

The initial Whitbourn novel that I read was Downs-Lord Dawn (1999), the first in a trilogy. The basic idea is that one Thomas Blades, an Anglican curate from 1680, finds a portal--through a grandfather clock--into another reality. There humanity lives in hiding, typically in underground burrows (at least in not-Surrey, where he lands), while a nonhuman humanoid species called the Null are dominant. They are ferocious predators that live rather like social insects and, though capable of intelligence, prefer a simple existence as hunters. Blades decides he will help humanity arise from underground and take on the Null, by importing firearms, the English language, and other elements of the culture he knows (and ultimately a fair number of English people to bring those skills). The result is a rather comic version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court crossed with Heart of Darkness, and maybe a bit of Lest Darkness Fall or Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen to boot. Blades faces all kinds of difficulties in his rise to God-Emperorship--the Null, rebellious members of his own family, followers who become Republicans after reading tracts from the English Civil War, and other humans who have gained access to the world (which is where the resemblance to Connecticut Yankee become most notable). He also contacts and makes bargains with extradimensional spirits that he describes as angels, though they are very far from the typical Christian picture of such.

I enjoyed Whitbourn's style and tongue-in-cheek humor, but I didn't find the book entirely satisfactory. I felt that in someways it fell between two stools. On the one hand, it is a sort of 'how to jumpstart a culture' novel, but the speed and thoroughness with which this happens just is not very believable, given that when Blades first contacts humans in the new world they are living in underground burrows with stone tools and no agriculture, and within 30 years or so they have reached a 17th-century level of technology and society. Whitbourn apparently recognized this problem, since he includes a preface saying, in effect, ignore all that and just go with the story. But with that level of verisimilitude lost, the tale becomes one of 'absolute power corrupting absolutely,' since Blades, a rather ineffectual figure back on Earth, rapidly becomes a ruthless dictator who sacrifices lots of people to attain his ends. And from that perspective, the story goes on a bit too long. Also, towards the end Blades seems to escape several difficulties through a deus ex machina that I won't specify for fear of giving away too much of the plot.

So, the book had some things I enjoyed, but ultimately did not make me that avid to read the sequels. Fortunately, a month or two later I read some other novels by Whitbourn that I liked a good deal more. But I'll save them for another post.

 

[AsenRG]

I've been reading a book on the Proto-Bulgarians before 7th Century. No sense posting it.

No, I haven't started The Letter yet, because that tome is thick!

 

[Lofgeornost]

I've been reading a book on the Proto-Bulgarians before 7th Century. No sense posting it.

No, I haven't started The Letter yet, because that tome is thick!

Please do. I've not read anything in that line since Browning's Byzantium and Bulgaria and Fine's The Early Medieval Balkans, both of which were written decades ago.

As a Christmas gift, I received Howard’s The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane—the Del Rey/Ballantine edition, with illustrations by Gary Gianni. Since most or all of Howard is out of copyright now, it’s easy to get cheapjack editions of his work, but I like the Del Rey collections, because they have carefully edited texts and various extras. This one contains all of the Kane stories published in Howard’s lifetime, some fragments of stories that did not appear until decades later, and several poems about Kane.

When I first encountered Howard as a teenager, I don’t think I read any of the stories about the wayward Puritan Solomon Kane, who predates Conan among Howard’s creations. I enjoyed these tales quite a bit, finishing the book in just two days. The characterization of Kane himself is somewhat uneven between stories; in some he is just a doughty adventurer or wanderer, and in others an unrelenting angel of vengeance. The language varies a bit too, from Howard’s normal prose to occasional dialogue that is rendered ‘forsoothly.’ But the stories are atmospheric and Howard’s gifts at action and horror are on full display in them.

Many of the tales are set in Africa, where Kane encounters lost civilizations and various supernatural horrors. These are well-done, though unsurprisingly marked by the racial attitudes of Howard’s time and place. I found myself wishing that Howard had written more with a European setting, in part because in the African stories the historical element recedes pretty far into the background. They could be ‘adventure in the jungle’ tales set anytime after the advent of gunpowder, really; as Haggard and Burroughs showed, you could have lost-race yarns set in Africa during the 19th or even 20th century. In the European tales the era matters more. Interestingly (or not) all the poems refer to Kane’s time as a sea-rover with the likes of Drake and Grenville, something the stories do not much explore.

One minor complaint—I’ve noticed that copies of the Del Rey paperbacks sold by Amazon are often rather beat up. This one certainly was. I’m not sure if Amazon ended up with a supply of somewhat damaged books, or if their current lackadaisacal approach to packing them for shipment is to blame. In any case, if I order other volumes from the series for myself, I think I’ll seek a different vendor.

 

[AsenRG]

Please do. I've not read anything in that line since Browning's Byzantium and Bulgaria and Fine's The Early Medieval Balkans, both of which were written decades ago.

"Ancient Bulgarian - Facts, Hypotheses, Fiction" by Vasil At.(anasov?) Vasilev, the author supports the idea of Bulgarians being a mixed race* of people even before appearing on the Balkan peninsula. According to him, it's most likely they were of Hun-Turkic and Iranian-Caucasian** stock, possibly with some (proto?)-Mongolians mixed in. He examines some of the most recent hypothesis on who exactly the ancient Bulgarians were and agrees with some, while shooting down some others.
I really should send him an e-mail to ask him about some of the statements, but I need to finish it first.


*I'm not pulling anyone's nose by the choice of words, not at all, precioussss! It's better to consider it inspired by REH...
**Coming from the name of the Caucasus mountain range.

 

[urbwar]

I snagged the 3rd issue of Savage Realms monthly. This issue has been very good. The first two stories were both excellent, and the one I'm currently reading (the continuing adventures of Redgar and Natali) has also been good.

 

[Silverlion]

I am re-reading Poul Anderson works: Operation Chaos, and Operation Luna, probably go through the various Polysotechnic series too.

 

[Lofgeornost]

I am re-reading Poul Anderson works: Operation Chaos, and Operation Luna, probably go through the various Polysotechnic series too.

I've been meaning to read more of his work; I read quite a few of his novels and short stories back in the 1970s and early 1980s, and The Dancer from Atlantis and The Winter of the World a year or two ago and enjoyed them. I started The Boat of a Million Years over the summer but got distracted and put it aside near the beginning.

A week or so ago I read Allan Scott and Michael Scott Rohan's A Spell of Empire (1992). It's a quest fantasy with comic elements. The hero, a young half-elven alchemist's apprentice (and amateur musician) Volker Seefreid, after his master's sudden demise, finds himself recruited as part of a trading mission from north of the Alps down to Sicily. As we soon learn, this is a cover for a more important and magical task. An evil sect is seeking two magical horns to use in some dastardly plot, and Volker has to manage one instrument and find the other to thwart them. He's assisted by three companions: a Norseman who can 'smell' magic, an arcane knight from Brittany who must be inebriated for his spells to work, and a defrocked priestess of a huntress-goddess.

It's an enjoyable, if rather slight, romp with a headlong pace; it moves from crisis to crisis (or action-sequence to action-sequence) nearly nonstop. There are some interesting set pieces, with stuff one could definitely mine for gaming, like the menacing underground oracle near a fortress of the Teutonic Knights, or the hiding place and guardians of the second horn. Some of the tale is gloriously over-the-top; the traders portage their riverboats over the Alps, using a kobold-engineered (and controlled) pathway, rather than finding a subterranean passage under them. Some of the humor works pretty well, but other parts fall rather flat--e.g., Italian characters sometimes speak like Chico Marx. I will admit that I didn't foresee exactly what the horns turned out to be, or the plot that the evil cultists had for them, which was nice.

The novel is notable from a gaming perspective mainly because it is clearly inspired by Warhammer. There is the same not-German Empire (in this case, the Nibelung Empire), with a tech-level of ca. 1500-1600, inquisitors and witch-hunters, polytheism organized rather like medieval Christianity, with different religious orders for different gods, and the threat of Chaos (here called Tartarus). The similarities even extend to minor details; one of the characters had a previous career as a ratcatcher, there is a lot of travel on riverboats, etc. But rather than Warhammer's Old World, the book is set in an alt-history version of our world, where the Roman emperor Constans* moved the capital from Constantinople to Sicily and the Burgundians founded a great empire north of the Alps. Since the Old World was already a skewed Europe-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off, moving the setting back is a little like The Magnificent Seven. Or maybe more like someone saying 'I really like Throne of Blood, but let's reset it in pseudo-medieval Scotland.' My guess is that the book was written as a Warhammer novel but for some reason not published that way, so the authors reworked the setting somewhat.

*Not, apparently, the real Constans I, since this fictional Constans reigned at about the same time as Attila.

 

[Endless Flight]

My wife pointed this out to me at B&N so I picked it up. Looks very interesting!

 

[Ronin]

My wife pointed this out to me at B&N so I picked it up. Looks very interesting!

View attachment 53768

That looks very interesting. I've been on a big western kick as of late. So that sort of thing is right in my view finder at the moment.

 

[Ronin]

I finally got the book I've been waiting for from amazon.

I love the illustrations, and the information. But the layout is horrible. By that I mean the spine is at the top, and it opens like a legal pad.

 

[Agemegos]

I just re-read Parkinson’s The Evolution of Political Thought. It’s still beautifully written, but it isn’t as informative as I remembered.

 

[Acmegamer]

I just re-read Parkinson’s The Evolution of Political Thought. It’s still beautifully written, but it isn’t as informative as I remembered.

That's because you are more jaded and experienced now. Before you were more optimistic and naive. Life's fun that way. ::stares off::

 

[Agemegos]

That's because you are more jaded and experienced now. Before you were more optimistic and naive.

No doubt I was more näive, but "optimistic" doesn't sound like me.

As a sort of New Year's resolution I have decided to read fewer on-line forums, watch less YouTube, and read more books, aiming to knock over one a week. I've started Anthony Flew's An Introduction to Western Philosophy; I have Joseph Henrick's The WEIRDest People in the World on its way from Amazon, and I'll go to the library this afternoon to order Emanuel Todd's The Explanation of Ideology through inter-library loan.

 

[thesheeep]

In my never-ending (feels like, anyway) quest to learn Finnish (before you ask, because I live here ) I have started to read Kamala Luonto (Bad Nature, there's some English editions).

I must say, it's actually quite funny!

 

[Mankcam]

I'm considering tracking down Gene Day's The Book Of The New Sun series, and also Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastard series.
Not sure which one to go for, as they both appeal to me.
The Gentleman Bastard series is more recent and readily available, yet The Book Of The New Sun series sounds more trippy and relevant to me as I'm considering running a full-on Numenera campaign this year.
First World Dilema here.

 

[Fenris-77]

I'm considering tracking down Gene Day's The Book Of The New Sun series, and also Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastard series.
Not sure which one to go for. The Gentleman Bastard series is more recent and readily available, yet The Book Of The New Sun series sounds more trippy and relevant to me as I'm considering running a full-on Numenera campaign next year.

The Gentlemen Bastards is fucking awesome. That would be my recommendation there.

 

[Mankcam]

The Gentlemen Bastards is fucking awesome.

That's some pretty enthusiastic praise there, don't hold back, heh heh

 

[Lofgeornost]

I'm considering tracking down Gene Day's The Book Of The New Sun series, and also Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastard series.
Not sure which one to go for, as they both appeal to me.
The Gentleman Bastard series is more recent and readily available, yet The Book Of The New Sun series sounds more trippy and relevant to me as I'm considering running a full-on Numenera campaign this year.

Gene Wolfe was one of the best sf/fantasy writers of his generation. The Book of the New Sun is still in print (I think), and you can get it in handy two-volume collections rather than the four books the original was divided into. The fifth add-on volume, Urth of the New Sun, is still in print too.

In the last couple of months I read Malcolm Gaskill's Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2010). As I suspect I've said before in this thread, some of the Oxford Very Short Introduction series are not really very good first reads on a subject--they tend to assume you already know at least some of the basics. This book is a good example of that; it makes interesting reading if you already know something about witchcraft, but I think somebody seeking a grounding would be very much at sea if he or she started with this volume.

The book has a difficult remit, to be sure, because witchcraft is a Protean subject. On the one hand, it is a broad category embracing roughly-analogous types of maleficent magic in the Ancient World, later in European history, and in many cultures around the world, including parts of contemporary Africa and Asia, alongside Wicca and other modern 'revivalists' and their practices. On the other hand, the lion's share of historical research and writing on the subject deals with Early Modern Europe and the Americas. Gaskill is a well-known expert in the latter, who wrote an interesting book on the Matthew Hopkins' witch-hunts in England in the 1640s, and much of the book focuses on Early Modern witchcraft, but there is some material on the other aspects of the subject as well. I thought the book would have been more successful if it had either focused more exclusively on witchcraft in Europe (and its colonies) between c. 1400 and c. 1700, or alternatively had cut that material back for more coverage of other times and places.

The main difficulty with the book as an introduction, though, is its organization. This is not (mainly) chronological or geographical, but thematic, and the themes are somewhat idiosyncratic. So there are chapters entitled Malice, Truth, Justice, Fantasy, and Rage, for example. The contents of these don't map particularly well to more usual ways of dividing up the subject, like you would find in Brian Levack's The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, or Julian Goodare's The European Witch-Hunt, both of which do work as introductions. Some issues, like skepticism about witchcraft, come back in chapter after chapter of Gaskill's text.

Gaskill also repeatedly points out the ambiguity of witchcraft and beliefs about it. That's fair enough, but so many of the theses or generalizations he introduces are immediately shot down or questioned that I'd imagine any novice reading the book would wonder 'so what, if anything, do we know for certain about witchcraft?' It's interesting material if you're already familiar with the subject, but not a good first read on it.

 

[Acmegamer]

I'm considering tracking down Gene Day's The Book Of The New Sun series, and also Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastard series.
Not sure which one to go for, as they both appeal to me.
The Gentleman Bastard series is more recent and readily available, yet The Book Of The New Sun series sounds more trippy and relevant to me as I'm considering running a full-on Numenera campaign this year.
First World Dilema here.

Man, I love both of those series. No reason to choose, get both series! NOW!

 

[carpocratian]

The book has a difficult remit, to be sure, because witchcraft is a Protean subject. On the one hand, it is a broad category embracing roughly-analogous types of maleficent magic in the Ancient World, later in European history, and in many cultures around the world, including parts of contemporary Africa and Asia, alongside Wicca and other modern 'revivalists' and their practices. On the other hand, the lion's share of historical research and writing on the subject deals with Early Modern Europe and the Americas.

"Witchcraft" is a really problematic term, as you indicated. I only use it to refer to cultural beliefs and movements that specifically used the term itself, or some close linguistic relative of it, excluding those cultures that adopted the term later due to colonial influences. It really isn't useful to use it as a general term for maleficent magic, though any number of anthropologists and folklorists (who should know better) have done so for a long time now.