Tag Archives: Jack Vance

December 1, 2024 · 5:29 am

Three graphic novels plus an unsatisfying fantasy

THE HUNGER AND THE DUSK by G. Willow Wilson and Chris Wildgoose is set in a fantasy world suffering from climate change where orcs and humans are increasingly clashing over the dwindling fertile lands, when the savage Vangols return to the continuent after centuries. Can the two races put aside their differences to fight off a worse threat? This is perfectly well done but nowhere near as distinctive as Wilson’s Cairo, her series Air or her novel Alif the Unseen — though someone who’s more a fan of epic fantasy than me might like her treatment of the tropes better.

DESTINY, NY: Who I Used To Be by Pat Shand and Manuel Preitano is set in a contemporary world where magic works and Chosen Ones are common enough that there’s a school for them. All Chosen Ones have to deal with “what do I do now that I’ve achieved my destin?” but Logan finished her mission at 13 and has been feeling lost ever since.

Now she’s getting a new lease on life as she strikes up a relationship with Lilith, daughter of a mob family. Unfortunately Logan’s fellow student Gia has just received a vision her destiny is to destroy the ultimate evil — and apparently it’s Lilith. My only complaint about this one is that while the final (as far as I know) volume and this one are normally priced, V2 is exorbitant, so I won’t be catching up on this series for a while.

THE NEWSBOY LEGION Volume II collects the rest of the series following Volume One, running from 1944 through 1947. This follows the same formula — the four newsboys stumble into trouble, the Guardian rescues them — but with various creators pinch-hitting for Simon and Kirby as they stayed busy with war work, it isn’t as charming (Curt Swan provided the cover to the right). Still a lot of fun, though.

Some years before Jack Vance followed up The Eyes of the Overworld with Cugel’s Saga, he authorized Michael Shea to write a sequel, THE QUEST FOR SIMBILIS. Once again Cugel is out to get revenge on the Laughing Magician; a new ally convinces him the best way is to locate the long-vanished master mage Simbilis, who will happily reward Cugel with triumph over his foe. The results are second-rate Vance, much as Shea’s later Color Out of Time was third-rate Lovecraft. The one quality of Vance Shea does master is misogyny, as he plays one woman’s demon-rape for laughs and Cugel assaulting a well-endowed prison guard later is supposed to be funny too. Forgettable.

All rights to images remain with current holders

From a spellshop to the valley of the kings: books

As I enjoyed Sarah Beth Durst’s The Bone Maker, I tried her fantasy cozy, THE SPELLSHOP, but ended up putting down unfinished.

The protagonist, Kiera, flees the imperial library when revolutionaries burn the capital. Accompanied by her pet spider-plant, she takes some of the surviving spellbooks back to the isolated island village her parents came from. She needs a found family, though she doesn’t know it yet; the dying village needs a shot in the arm. Hmm, this might work out well.

Durst said she wanted this book to be comforting, like a mug of hot chocolate, and she succeeded. However like a lot of stories about returning to your family’s small town it’s got the same worldview as the 1939 Wizard of Oz, that there’s no point in looking for happiness beyond your own backyard, and that really isn’t a perspective I can identify with. So it’s a no-go.

(Yep, another post where I’m throwing in random pet photos for eye candy)

In 1936, Lester Dent took a break from writing Doc Savage and among other writing sold two novellas, HADES AND HOCUS POCUS to the top magazine Argosy. In Hades, a med student whose education has ended early winds up helping out a movie producer who believes he’s uncovered a gateway to Hell — and something from Hell has followed him back. In Hocus Pocus, an unemployed stage magician takes a job investigating an evangelical fellowship’s alleged mind-reading powers and discovers the church has more sinister goings on than he anticipated.

The first has a fun cast, including the protagonist’s sidekick Haw (he laughs at his own, very bad jokes) and a professional strongwoman. However the plot feels too much like countless Doc Savage stories about elaborate supernatural fakes — I imagine Dent would have recycled this for the last novel in the series, Up from Earth’s Center, if his editor hadn’t insisted on a real supernatural threat. Hocus Pocus has less memorable characters but it’s a much stronger story.

EIGHT FANTASMS AND MAGICS is a mixed bag of shorts by Jack Vance. Three of them I’ve read before (two of the rereads are from The Dying Earth and Eyes of the Overworld), some are meh but the two best are very very good — the solution in “Telek” to the mutants vs. humans problem is really good. Overall, though, only fair for Vance.

WOMEN IN THE VALLEY OF KINGS: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age by Kathleen Sheppard is a mixed bag. It’s a good look at 19th and early 20th century Egyptology with a particular emphasis on the women who were involved and largely eclipsed — excavators, authors, teachers, women who underwrote expeditions, artists who captured temples and tombs on paper (the best non-invasive way to record discoveries as photography would have captured things in black and white). And yes, Sheppard is fully aware of the colonialist/cultural appropriation side of what European archeologists did and doesn’t hide from it. Unfortunately a lot of the book bogs down in inside-baseball stuff — lists of famous names (often nobody I’ve heard of), schools and books. Still worth a read though.

#SFWAPro. Cover by Jack Gaughan, all rights to images remain with current holders.

2 Comments

Filed under Doc Savage, Reading

Tagged as Jack Vance

September 22, 2024 · 5:15 am

Teens and immortals: two books

As I like Thomas Hine’s Populuxe and The Great Funk, I anticipated a good read in his THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN TEENAGER: A New History of the American Adolescent Experience. I didn’t get it.

Several writers have discussed “teenager” as a concept that took form in the 20th century. Hine agrees, arguing that before high school became near-universal, there was no common teenage experience: social class, strength and size (a strapping 12-year-old might be working on the docks like an adult while a scrawny 15 year old was still considered a kid), parent’s business (farm? General store? Accounting?), city or country, black or white made adolescence too diverse. Hine says that having a common youth culture also springs out of the high school experience but has been splintering since the baby boom into multiple subcultures such as Goth, stoner, jock, theater nerd, etc.

This one didn’t work for me. The writing isn’t as lively as his earlier books, gets cliched as it approaches the century’s end (his analysis isn’t that different from the average teen movie) and it suffers from omissions — nothing on feminism, nothing on gay kids being increasingly out. Not a winner.

Neither was Jack Vance’s TO LIVE FOREVER, set in a distant future where thed 1 percent receive cloning-based immortality while assassinations of the lower classes makes up for the drain on Earth’s resources the immortals cause (this idea isn’t explored enough). Protagonist Waylock achieved Amaranth (the immortal social class), then got sentenced to death when he murdered another Amaranth, though as he points out it didn’t cost them anything but inconvenience. Now he’s posing as his own renegade clone in hopes of regaining Amaranth status but the rules for doing so are byzantine — and the beautiful immortal Jacynth seems to have figured out his true identity.

Stories of a protagonist smashing through a hostile society to achieve success have a long history in SF but this one doesn’t work. Part of that is that the ending feels forced and the Jacynth simply drops out of the story. Not Vance’s best.

#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holder.

1 Comment

Filed under Reading

Tagged as Jack Vance

June 23, 2024 · 5:28 am

Farewell, Planet of Adventure!

In the first two Planet of Adventure books, Earther Adam Reith’s space ship is shot down while approaching Tschai. He crash lands and discovers a world of bizarre societies where the descendants of abducted Earth humans have been bred into servant races for the Wankh (yes, I know), the Chasch, the Dirdir and Tschai’s native race, the Pnume. Reith has to navigate the strange cultures of Tschai and somehow build a spaceship to return home.

THE DIRDIR is easily the best book in the series: Reith launches a scheme to buy and assemble a spaceship on the black market, financing it by hunting the avian-evolved Dirdir while they’re out hunting men (“You say they carry the valuables of their victims on their person as they return to the camp?”). This, of course, proves harder than it looks … The Dirdir are the most interesting of the alien races on Tschai which helps makes this book a winner.

On the brink of departure, Reith’s treacherous associate Woudiver sells him out to THE PNUME, scholars who want such a unique creature preserved in their underground museum, Foreverness. Reith escapes the Pnume accompanied by Zap, one of their human servants. Can they stay out of reach and make it back to his launch site?

The Pnume underworld is creepy and their culture’s handling of knowledge (“That’s a Class Twenty secret!”) is interesting. Once we’re back on the surface, however, things get too quiet and the slow and the final wrap-up seems a little abrupt — no showdown with Woudiver. We never do learn who shot Reith’s ship down in City of the Chasch. I do like Zap’s treatment of the repressed Zap, though, and I’m surprised to actually have an oblique reference to menstruation in the book.

THE SNOW QUEEN’S SHADOW by Jim C. Hines is the finish in a four-volume series (which I haven’t otherwise read) wherein sword-and-sorcery versions of fairy-tale princesses battle against evil (Hines says his daughter going through a Disney Princess phase inspired this). Here, shattering Snow White’s mirror liberates a demon that turns people cold and vicious whenever the shards scratch them—and with the help of Snow’s ice magic, a lot of people get scratched, leaving Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty struggling find some way to stop their buddy. Downbeat end but a good read, and I give Hines extra points for making this easy for a new reader to follow (I’ve seen too many writers who don’t).

#SFWApro. Covers by HR Van Dongen, all rights remain with current holders.

From Angola to Tschai, from Metropolis to Pellucidar: books

NJINGA OF ANGOLA: Africa’s Warrior Queen by Linda M. Heywood looks at a 17th century ruler who fought a long resistance against Portuguese colonization and slave-trading, eventually establishing herself as a Portuguese vassal (as opposed to complete subjugation) through a mix of military action, diplomacy, religion (converting to Christianity accomplished a lot, though Heywood thinks it was a sincere act of faith as well as good politics) and effective spectacle — like many great rulers, Njinga knew how to put on a show.

Unsettling in showing that the African culture could be as brutal and ugly as colonialism and everyone on both sides thought nothing of trading slaves like currency. Also good on showing the complexity of the politics: at one point the Jesuits scotched a peace deal because they resented that Njinga had negotiated it through Capuchin priests. While European historians for decades portrayed Njinga as barbaric and oversexed she was a hero in both Angola and Brazil (the Portuguese shipped a lot of slaves there from her part of Africa).
Jack Vance’s Planet of Adventure quartet has Earth agent Adam Reith respond to a distress call from the planet Tschai only to be shot down at the beginning of CITY OF THE CHASCH. Tschai turns out to be occupied by several alien species and their human followers, plus the sinister native Pnume; humans independent of the aliens have developed the typical bizarre cultures of a Vance world. With no allies and no way to contact Earth, can Reith survive, let alone learn who downed him?

That first book was only okay but SERVANTS OF THE WANKH picked up considerably (and if you laughed at the title, you’re not alone). Here there’s much more emphasis on how Reith negotiates Tschai’s strange societies, more complicated by the number of them trying to con or manipulate him (it reminds me a lot of Eyes of the Overworld). When I first read this, I was stunned that the love interest from the first book wound up going homicidally insane, then dying (“What, she’s not his Dejah Thoris?”) but now I wonder if it isn’t more of Vance’s sexism — and the woman was so bland, she became more interesting when she went psycho.

DC UNIVERSE: Trail of Time by Jeff Mariotte is a spinoff Superman novel which opens with Clark Kent plodding away in a dystopian Metropolis under a red sun when he learns Lois has been murdered for investigating a shadowy figure named Vandal Savage. The Phantom Stranger and Jason Blood then reveal that this is an artificial timeline created by Savage, Felix Faust and Mordru which will soon replace the real Earth unless the heroes stop them with the help of Dr. Occult, Zatanna, Bat Lash, Jonah Hex, El Diablo and Brian Savage.This is very much a product of its late George W. Bush era in the dystopia’s military industrial complex (“Every time we defeat an enemy there’s always another one we have to start arming against.”) and some of its comics details (Phantom Stranger as a Lord of Order) but overall a solid job. However constantly referring to Brian as “Scalphunter” doesn’t work for me — yes, it was the name of his old series (discussed at the link) but he never called himself that and didn’t take scalps, so it comes off rather racist.

Edgar Rice Burroughs returns to the story of David Innes, Emperor of Pellucidar, in LAND OF TERROR, but unlike Back to the Stone Age it feels like he’s just going through the motions. Searching for Von Horst (the protagonist of the previous book), David winds up slave of an Amazonian tribe (wildly misogynist writing — Burroughs cannot conceive of gender equality so he assumes men in charge is better), then the prisoner of a tribe of lunatics who’ve also captured his empress Dian the Beautiful (ERB’s fondness for coincidence again) then later a prisoner on a floating island before things wrap up even more abruptly than in Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. Burroughs going through the motions is still more entertaining than many other writers but this is the weakest in the series. Fortunately I recall the seventh volume, Savage Pellucidar, as improving on it.

#SFWApro. Art top to bottom by HR Van Dongen, Jim Aparo and Jose Garcia-Lopez.

1 Comment

Filed under Comics, Reading

Tagged as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack Vance

March 5, 2023 · 5:09 am

The Bat, the Chinese Super-Man, a big planet and Hamlet!

My Silver Age reread at Atomic Junkshop includes Batman, of course. I’ve blogged about the New Look of 1964 and the changes it brought to Batman and Detective Comics (including Carmine Infantino’s art, as on the cover here). That prompted me to pick up TwoMorrow’s THE BATCAVE COMPANION: An Examination of the New Look (1964-1969) and Bronze Age (1970-1979 Batman and Detective Comics by Michael Eury and even though I’m familiar with a lot of the material I found it worth purchasing. The book mixes straight interviews with barticles covering Batman’s rise to number one after the TV show and Robin’s brief string of “relevant” ripped-from-the-headlines solo stories.

Among the interesting details are that Neal Adams really admired Bob Haney (Adams’ first Bat-work was illustrating Haney’s Brave and the Bold stories) and was completely baffled why “Secret of the Waiting Graves’ — Adams’ first story with Denny O’Neil — became such a hit.There’s lots about what a scam artist Bob Kane was when it came to taking credit for someone else’s work, Mike Barr (of Batman and the Outsiders) on mystery-solving clubs (as background to the Silver Age Mystery Analysts of Gotham City) and one article on Poison Ivy answering a question I had of why they created her rather than using Catwoman (she comes off very much a Selina knockoff in her first appearance). As usual with this sort of reference book, well worth it if this topic is in your wheelhouse.

THE NEW SUPER-MAN: Equilibrium and THE NEW SUPER-MAN AND THE JUSTICE LEAGUE OF CHINA by (primarily Gene Luen Yang and Brent Peeples continue the series from the Coming to America TPB. Kong Kenan has to deal with the previous volume’s reveal about his parentage; battle the usual assortment of menaces; resist a crackdown by the government-backed Green Lantern Corps of China; battle I Ching’s evil twin (I do like the origin for that villain); and help a North Korean defector with super-powers of his own. Great fun.

Jack Vance’s THE BIG PLANET is a 1950s adventure that feels like Vance is warming up to the superior stories he did later in the same vein. Big Planet is a distant planet so ginormous that all manner of Earth fringe groups, minorities, races and cults have found a home there (reminding me of Mack Reynolds’ Section G); Earth allows this but doesn’t intervene or help. Now, however, a Big Planet wannabe emperor is purchasing off-world weapons and tech in return for the one thing Big Planet has a surplus of, people. An Earth commission arrives to stop the trafficking but the emperor’s agent sabotages their ship, sending it crashing 40,000 miles from the lone Earth enclave.

Getting from Point A to B through a variety of strange and hostile cultures while ferreting out the traitor provides the plot. Most of the settings, however, aren’t as colorful as later Vance books and some have not aged well — evil Roma, black colonists turned cannibal. The characters are flat and the women flatter, though the sexism isn’t as bad as some later books. I did enjoy it even so.

HAMLET was a local production of the play “that’s full of cliches” (I’d forgotten how many of the lines have worked its way into our regular language) that marks the first time I’ve seen it onstage; this stood out for a mostly black cast and a black woman as Hamlet himself (which an actor friend says is quite trendy now). I liked this more than TYG did, particularly the spare set (see below) and staging (having the old king’s grave become a platform that elevates Claudius and Gertrude when they first appear) Overall not first-ranked Hamlet but a good one. “I know a hawk from a handsaw.”#SFWApro. Covers by Infantino and Adams, all rights remain with current holders.

3 Comments

Filed under Comics, Reading

Tagged as Jack Vance

November 8, 2020 · 5:15 am

Rogues, long-distance lovers and UFOs: books read

After publishing Eyes of the Overworld in 1966, Jack Vance authorized a sequel, The Search for Simbilis, by Michael Shea. Then in 1983 he released a sequel of his own, CUGEL’S SAGA, picking up directly from the end of Overworld, at the point where Cugel’s revenge on the Laughing Magician has instead dumped the rogue on the far side of the world. Determined to make it home, Cugel sets out across the dying Earth, scamming everyone he meets except when they scam him first — though at least this time, his defeats are due to dumb luck rather than his own stupidity.

I enjoyed this but not as much as the first two Dying Earth books. At 300 pages, the picaresque formula wears thinner, and sexism is still a problem. Women are either unpleasant battle axes to be thwarted or sexpots to be seduced or betrayed; the seventeen virgins Cugel seduces (or rapes?) in one story never even appear on stage. So despite its appeal, severely flawed.

The graphic novel LONG DISTANCE by Thom Zaler starts with protagonist Carter telling a family at the airport that he used to be in a long-distance relationship, then flashes back to show how he and Lee (the other protagonist) met cute in another airport and began a long-distance relationship. Despite being perfect for each other, they’re both attached to their jobs, and that leaves them stuck in Columbus and Chicago, respectively; can they make it work?

This is cute and funny (as I’d expect from the creator of Love and Capes) though despite having met TYG long-distance it didn’t strike a chord as much as I’d expected. Probably because Lee and Carter are uncertain about where the relationship is going where TYG and I agreed up front we’d get married if things worked out. But that’s not a flaw in the book.

I read HOW UFOS CONQUERED THE WORLD: The History of a Modern Myth by David Clarke as background for Alien Visitors but it works well in its own right. A former UFO believer, Clarke details how a chance sighting by one pilot in 1947 kicked off America’s flying saucer obsession (though the pilot never said the ships he saw were saucer shaped), though the book also covers some of the earlier Things In The Sky incidents (a mystery airship at the end of the 19th century, the “foo fighters” of WW II). He then dissects the evidence that even trained observers aren’t reliable eyewitnesses, goes inside Britain’s government UFO tracking group (regrettably as Clarke’s English there’s less on U.S. research) to dismiss the stories of men in black and discusses how much pop culture influences UFO beliefs as well as vice versa. For instance one theory, that the U.S. is flying planes incorporating alien tech, originated on X-Files, the passed into UFOlogy. The best of my research reading to date.

As I’ve read and liked several of Raymond F. Jones’ short stories I picked up RAYMOND F. JONES RESURRECTED: Selected Science Fiction Stories of Raymond F. Jones to read a few more. The focus of Jones’ SF stories is often science itself. In “Noise Level” a group of physicists learn someone has invented antigravity and try to duplicate it; “Tools of the Trade” has Earth engineers struggling to repair an alien technology; “The Unlearned” debates whether Earth should give up independent research in return for learning the secrets of the universe for a more advanced race. Jones is clearly a fan of thinking outside the box as all three stories hinge on breaking away from conventional paradigms. It appears he’s also one of those writers who aren’t big on villains, preferring antagonists who are simply misguided. I was convinced the aliens in “The Unlearned” must be up to some scheme for instance but no, it turns out they’re simply wrong. I enjoyed this enough to dig out the one collection of Jones’ stuff I already have.

#SFWApro. Cover by Jack Gaughan, all rights to image remain with current holder.

2 Comments

Filed under Comics, Reading

Tagged as Alien visitors, Jack Vance

April 28, 2020 · 5:12 am

Grimdark with a smile: Jack Vance’s Eyes of the Overworld

Grimdark fantasy existed long before the term; Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword is as grimdark as you can get and it’s decades old. THE EYES OF THE OVERWORLD, Jack Vance’s sequel to The Dying Earth, doesn’t initially read grimdark — it’s stylish, elegant and humorous — but it has a view of the world just as grim as Game of Thrones. The protagonist, Cugel the Clever, is an amoral antihero and rapist (I’ll come back to that last point) but most of the people he encounters are as greedy, corrupt and selfish as he is. Despite his nickname, Cugel isn’t all that clever; when he thinks he’s scamming someone, his confidence in his own cunning blinds him that he’s the one being snared.

Like the first book, this is a collection of short stories, here linked by Cugel’s quest. In the opening, someone talkes Cugel into robbing Incounou, the Laughing Magician (if he’s laughing at you, you’re in for it) which doesn’t go well. Incounou extracts a promise from Cugel to hunt for one of the eponymous eyes, contact lenses that transform whatever you’re looking at into a world of beauty. Not being an idiot, the mage puts a tiny creature inside Cugel to gnaw his vitals if the thief runs off or in some fashion tries to double-deal. Then off we and Cugel go on a picaresque, black-humored journey across the dying future Earth.

This came out 16 years after the first book and Vance’s style has improved considerably. At one point a sorcerer says he can foretell Cugel’s future but it will require wrapping Cugel in the intestines of freshly killed owls, burning his little toe and dilating his nostrils to let an explorer beetle enter his body. Cugel passes. And Vance is very good on imaginary names: “The great cities Impergos, Tharuwe, Rhaverjand — all unheard of? What of the illustrious Sembers?” Exotic names, but believable ones, I think; they sound right.

The story is cynical as hell. Cugel lies, cheats and steals, and cons people with this voice of injured reason (under the circumstances, surely you can’t suggest that I pay for this meal!); his intended marks abuse him just as much. In one story he’s marked out as the sacrifice to the local bat-creatures; in another he’s tricked into serving as the town watchman (an important post) by being promised luxury, food and the woman of his choice; instead he ends up trapped in the watchtower with no luxury, crappy food and no sex. While I’m not a big fan of antiheroes — and Cugel’s the least heroic antihero I’ve read since Flashman — the results are entertaining and often funny. But then there’s the rapey stuff.

Dying Earth was sexist, but Eyes is a lot worse. In the watchman story, Cugel picks out one of the local women to be his mistress, then slowly (very slowly) realizes she’s just part of the con the town is playing on him. When he escapes, he takes her with him, rapes her and then she’s killed by a monster at the climax. In another story, Cugel’s bid to pass himself off as a rightful king fails spectacularly and he has to flee the city alongside Derwe Coreme, the former ruler. They become lovers but when Cugel needs help from a family of vagabonds they ask for his woman in return; he hands her over to be their sex slave without hesitation, then forgets about her. He has no qualms and neither does Vance seem to care about the women.

I don’t mean that this makes Vance pro-rape; he’s writing a dark, cynical story in a corrupt world so it’s not like the rape doesn’t fit the setting. Nor does Cugel show remorse about anything else. But nothing else he does is comparably vicious; okay, his revenge on Incounou might be, but that’s revenge, where his treatment of Derwe is gratuitous cruelty. And Vance treats it as no more consequential than stealing a character’s dinner in another chapter. Much as I liked the rest of the book, I don’t think I’d recommend it.

#SFWApro. Top cover by George Barr, bottom by Jack Gaughan; all rights to covers remain with current holder.

5 Comments

Filed under Is Our Writers Learning?

Tagged as Jack Vance

March 8, 2020 · 5:06 am

Heroes with Secret Pasts and a dying Earth: books read

Andre Norton’s THE JARGOON PARD is the first sequel to Year of the Unicorn, set in Arvon, the homeland of the Wereriders. Arvon comes off much like Estcore, a land that sealed itself off after arrogant mages opened dimensional gates to Very Bad Things, and protagonist Kethan has a backstory similar to Kerovan of Crystal Gryphon, a son born touched by magic so that his mother can use him as a tool to attain power.

Surprisingly, though, the book charts it’s own course, starting with Mom bearing a girl, whom she promptly swaps for the son of another woman (Gillan of Unicorn). Like so many Witch World protagonists, Kethan grows up feeling something of an outsider, then one of his mother’s rivals gives him a magic belt that triggers his innate shapeshifting powers. Now he’s a pard (big puma — the jargoon is the carved gem on the belt’s clasp) but he can’t turn back unless he submits to the will of his mother’s resident sorceress — and Kethan would sooner die. The results are solidly entertaining; this is also the first book to spotlight the worship of the harvest/mother goddess Gunnora, which plays a big role in many later books.

THE DARK WORLD has Henry Kuttner’s name on it but some researchers suggest C.L. Moore is co- or sole author. While it has a lot in common with Mask of Circe, it also resembles Dwellers in the Mirage (amnesiac hero with buried memories, good vs. bad girl, other-dimensional soul-sucking horror) and would later inspire both Roger Zelazny’s Amber and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Falcons of Narabedla.

Oh, wait, you might want to know about the story too! The protagonist is a WW II veteran suffering strange blackouts and odd memories. When he’s drawn into the eponymous alternate timeline, he discovers that’s because he’s actually Ganelon, a member of the ruling coven of mages, bound to the other-dimensional horror Llyr; the resistance against the coven managed to swap him and the real veteran (parallel world counterparts), leaving Ganelon with the veteran’s memories. Now that Ganelon’s back, he’s ready to regain power, which requires working with the resistance against the coven and somehow driving Llyr back from this plane of existence. The result is a lively fantasy, though the random mix of myth names (Llyr, Medea, Freydis) is jarring (as Lin Carter says, names matter).

In THE STARMAN OF LLYRDIS by Leigh Brackett, an Earthman who’s spent his entire life as even more of an outcast than Kethan learns the reason: he’s only half-human, the other half being Varddan, the one race that can survive interstellar travel due to a gen-engineering breakthrough a millennium ago. The protagonist proves his Varddan genes hold true and wins the right to live and work in space — but then allies himself with revolutionaries who want to share the genetic breakthrough with all the races of the galaxy. A perfect example of Brackett’s fondness for characters who achieve their dreams only to find them hollow (as her husband put it).

Jack Vance’s THE DYING EARTH is probably best known as the basis for spellcasting in D&D (Gary Gygax copied Vance’s idea that mages can only hold a limited number of spells in their mind) but deserves to be known in its own right. On a distant future Earth, various wizards and occasional mortals feud, seek love or quest for knowledge amidst ruined cities, ancient secrets and unpleasant cults.

This blew me away when I read it as a teen, but less so now. The treatment of the female characters is sexist and Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique (which I suspect was a big influence) is a much eerier, darker setting, and Smith is a better writer. That said, this is still entertaining and enjoyably eerie.

#SFWApro. Top cover by Gray Morrow, bottom image is uncredited. Rights to both remain with current holder.

3 Comments

Filed under Reading

Tagged as Andre Norton, Henry Kuttner, Jack Vance, Leigh Brackett

June 6, 2015 · 1:18 pm

One book, some graphic novels (#SFWApro)

THE MANY WORLDS OF MAGNUS RIDOLPH struck me as minor Jack Vance when I first read it, and rereading doesn’t change that impression. The exploits of the elderly but cunning trouble-shooter dealing with everything from intelligent sardines to a planet of thieves are readable enough, but don’t particularly stand out from any other pulp problem solver. And like so many stories from the forties, the assumption everyone will be using tobacco in the far future now looks dated (though films such as Dimensions where apparently nobody in the 1930s smokes are just as dated in a different way).

SPIDER-MAN: Crime and Punisher is a mix of stories including a Punisher two parter, a story where Flash Thompson reflects on Spidey’s influence on him (easily the best in the book) and where writer Joe Kelly attempts to update the Bronze Age villain Hammerhead. Unfortunately while I can see Kelly’s reasoning that Hammerhead’s shtick (acting and talking like a 1930s Warner Brothers mobster) has been done to death, he doesn’t offer us anything better—he could have plugged the Rhino or Man-Mountain Marko into the story and gotten the same result.

FINDER by Carla Speed McNeil has a great rep, but I couldn’t get into it: the story of the titular wanderer Jaeger and his various relationships is well-written (as the intro notes, McNeil has a great feel for relationship scenes) but it has no dramatic arc or momentum, at least not in the first 200 pages (I gave up. Forgive me). I’m not sure if that’s the fault of “decompressed” storytelling or just a matter of taste, but either way this didn’t work for me.

CHEW: Chicken Tenders by John Layman and Rob Guillory is one in a series (Vol. 9) of oddball adventures involving Tony Chu, who gets psychic impressions from things he eats, with murderers, terrorists and a vampire with even greater “cibopath” powers than Chu has. Doesn’t convert me to a fan, but I’ll definitely look at this series again.

1 Comment

Filed under Comics, Reading

Tagged as Jack Vance