My latest post is up on the blog of Tales from the Magician's Skull: Ten Sword-and-Sorcery Tales for the Haunting Season.
I'm feeling the Halloween season. Over the last three nights, while doing some late evening bookkeeping, I've had in the background Poltergeist, The Witch (2016), and Scream. I do love horror movies... but I also love sword-and-sorcery, and as my post shows one needn't necessarily choose one over the other.
What are your favorite horror-infused S&S tales?
My latest entry for DMR is up. Check out Moorcock's Missed Elric Opportunity here.
This one seems to be gaining a lot of traction on Facebook and elsewhere. Combine a classic fantasy property with an interested director in 1970s Hollywood, and season with reminiscence by the author himself culled from a recent podcast--wham.
For the record, I don't need to see my favorite books adapted into film--I'm perfectly happy if they remain on the printed page. But I can't help but wonder what a Ralph Bakshi adaptation might have looked like. A mess quite likely, but perhaps something glorious, or at least messily memorable. The point is, we'll never know.
Maybe one day Elric will be adapted to the screen, but Moorcock had the opportunity 43-odd years ago, and there's been nothing of substance since. Just speculation and development hell.
I'm still in the discovery/absorption phase of Senjutsu, Iron Maiden's new album. This has been my pattern with all of Maiden's releases of the last two decades. Starting with their first post reunion album, Brave New World, Maiden has tended to write longer material that takes time to absorb. I've been busy with work and other things and so haven't yet gotten a proper feel for the album in its entirety.
A couple of songs grabbed me right out of the gate, however, among them "Darkest Hour." This is the latest entry in their various odes to World War II ("Aces High," "The Longest Day," etc.), and is a powerful, heartfelt ode to Winston Churchill and his refusal to accede to his critics and bend the knee to the Nazi war machine:
To blaze in glory like a dying sun
One last burning giant till Jupiter moves on
Turn the ploughshares into swords
You sons of Albion awake defend this sacred land
I now consider ERB one of the holy trinity of speculative
fiction, along with Howard and Tolkien. He’s right up there with those two in
influence and imagination. Your mileage may vary but that’s my power trio, with
H.P. Lovecraft coming up close in the rear-view mirror.
Sometimes you can find clues of what makes a great writer by
analyzing the facts of his or her life. From a young age ERB was a restless,
free spirit. He was highly imaginative, and playful, but he was also
relentless. He didn’t stay at any one job for long as he was always searching for
the next move, the next scheme, or the career that would lend his life meaning.
The string of low-paying jobs he held did not.
These traits often got him into trouble as a youth and
resulted in financial woes as a young man. He preferred the outdoors to
studying in class. In the army, his nonconformist streak caused him to get
busted down in rank and never made him a great fit for the discipline of the armed
services. Upon discharge in 1897 he had to overcome a number of struggles all
the way to early middle age. These were often of his own making. At several
junctures he could have settled for a life of normalcy, but time and again opted
out. At one point he was on his way to financial security with a great job at
Sears, and senior leadership loved him, but he quit, abruptly.
I know I could not have made the choices he did, which often
left he and his young wife penniless. But, his choices ultimately gave us
worlds beyond worlds.
ERB finally broke through as a writer in 1912 with “Under
the Moons of Mars,” and later that same year “Tarzan of the Apes,” both
published as serials in The All-Story.
That’s a hell of an opening combination right there. By then he was in his late
30s, a relatively late start for a writer, but the stage was set for a torrent
of production. He had lived a life of scarcity and brushes with poverty, and
when he finally found his calling the creativity rushed from his pen.
ERB famously wrote that “entertainment is fiction’s
purpose,” and his stories are entertainment first, of the highest order. But
they weren’t just that. He explored themes of nature vs. nurture, and the evils
and depravity of civilization vs. the (harsh) purity of nature. Destructive man
with all his vices is contrasted with the beasts of the jungle, who
kill and eat but not out of malice or wanton destruction. ERB was also a
skilled satirist, critiquing organized religion for example in “The Gods of
Mars.” His stories offer a coherent and compelling worldview and a richness
deeper than just story.
ERB was influenced by H. Rider Haggard, the grandfather of
adventure fiction. Tarzan was derived from the Romulus/Remus myth in which the
two founders of Rome were raised by wolves, and to a lesser degree Kipling. But
by his own admission ERB was not a big reader of fiction; these were childhood
reads. Perhaps as a result, stylistically he is probably the weakest of the
major fantasists mentioned above. But his stories are propulsive, and his ideas
and storytelling and creativity are on another level. He was doing things no
one else was, breaking away from the more formal Victorianism of Haggard et al
and writing stuff the people of the age could not put down.
More than 100 years later, they still can’t.
It’s a shame that ERB did not live a bit longer to see the resurgence
in interest in his works in the Burroughs Boom of the 1960s. Like REH I’m not
sure how widely read he is these days. But both men’s creations are immortal.
Just like we’ll always have Conan, John Carter and Tarzan are with us to stay.
Porges’ bio starts slow, 170-odd pages of military and
schooling detail that run a bit tedious. But once “Under the Moons of Mars” is out, it hits its
stride. In my reading it’s currently October 1912 and Burroughs is finally meeting
with success. He’s just completed “The Gods of Mars” for All-Story editor Thomas Metcalf, reader demand for more is huge,
and although he has not yet landed a book deal his fortunes are about to
dramatically shift.
It’s like I’m reading one of his stories, and I can’t wait to
see what dramatic twists and turns come next.
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| Fafhrd and GM going at it, for show, in "The Lords of Quarmall" |
In a time when publishers looked down upon the still-nascent
subgenre, and authors like Leiber had to abandon S&S and write SF to make a
living, Goldsmith (1933-2002) went out on a limb and published the likes of Leiber,
Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, and John Jakes in the pages of a magazine in which she
served as editor--Fantastic Stories.
From Moorcock’s introduction:
In those days the kind of
supernatural romance which dominates today’s best-seller lists had virtually no
commercial market. Leiber had done no better with his first Gray Mouser book
than I had done with my first Elric book. Not only publishers scoffed at the
notion of mass-market editions of these books, we authors scoffed equally. We
knew there were only about twenty of us—readers and writers—spread thin across
Britain and America… So Cele Goldsmith, when she commissioned Fritz Leiber to
write a new series of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories for Fantastic, was taking a big gamble with
her circulation figures.
Goldsmith had a reputation for bucking commercial trends throughout her career and so published Leiber's less-fashionable S&S. In so doing she improved the climate and conditions that allowed sword-and-sorcery to reach
full flower later in the decade with the publication of the unauthorized The Lord of the Rings, the republication
of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of
Mars, and the publication of the Lancer Conan Saga.
The great publisher Donald A. Wollheim later gave Leiber an
even greater boost by commissioning him for the now-famous “Swords” paperback series
(Swords and Deviltry, Swords Against
Death, Swords in the Mist, etc. But it’s questionable whether Leiber would
have been afforded that opportunity without first showcasing some of his best work
in Fantastic (note: I am not
discounting Leiber’s start with F&GM in the pages of the John W. Campbell
edited Unknown). Under Goldsmith’s
editorship Fantastic published a huge
number of the all-time Fafhrd and Gray Mouser classics, including the likes of
“Bazaar of the Bizarre,” “Lean Times in Lankhmar,” “Stardock,” “The Two Best
Thieves in Lankhmar,” and “Scylla’s Daughter,” the last of which was later
expanded into the 1968 novel The Swords
of Lankhmar. Again from Moorcock/White Wolf introduction:
Perhaps because [Goldsmith and
Wollheim] worked mostly as pulp fiction editors, they have never been given the
considerable credit they deserve, just as Fritz himself—who wrote so much that
was illuminating on the subject of literary fantasy and who wrote some of the
best examples there will ever be—still does not receive sufficient credit for
his enormous contribution to the genre.
It strikes me that I failed to mention the efforts of
Goldsmith in Flame and Crimson,
though I did mention Fantastic Stories
and other magazines as being important vehicles for S&S in the early 1960s,
as well as the efforts of Wollheim and his great DAW volumes. I missed a chance
to give Goldsmith her just due, and that is my error. I do not own the White
Wolf edits of Fafhrd and GM so was oblivious to the existence of this essay. An
unfortunate oversight I will rectify when I get to a second edition.
*A great watering-hole
for fans of S&S. I was unaware of the Discord platform until joining, which
in contrast to its name is a cohesive and welcoming community.
Any Howard Pyle fans in the house? If so, or if you're looking for fun, old-school, historical fiction adventure, my review of Pyle's Men of Iron is now up on DMR Blog.
