Category Archives: Robert E. Howard

Blogging Kull: The Striking of the Gong

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Kull:  Exile of Atlantis
Del Rey
trade paper, 317 p., $17

This is one of the shorter Kull stories, only three and a half pages in the Del Rey edition.  In fact it’s more of vignette or a philosophical meditation than an actual story.  In it Howard reflects on some of the philosophy he’d been reading and meditating on.

The story, to the extent that it is a story, consists mostly of a dialogue between Kull and an old man.  Kull finds himself in darkness, a great throbbing in his head.  He’s not sure where he is or how he came to be there.  He rises to his feet, sees a light, and begins to walk towards it.

Encountering an old man, Kull inquires as to where he is.  The man tells him he’s come through the Door.  Kull is able to recall that he heard a gong striking and then he woke up in the darkness.  What ensues is a discussion about life and death and what constitutes either.  Universes within universes are considered, as well as the rise and fall of races and kingdoms.  “Time and space are relative and do not really exist,” the old man declares.  He continues by saying, “The ‘everlasting’ stars change in their own time, as swiftly as the races of men rise and fade.  Even as we watch, upon those which are planets, beings are rising from the slime of the primeval, are climbing up the long slow roads to culture and wisdom, and are being destroyed with their dying worlds.  All life and a part of life.”

Some of the discussion echoes one of Howard’s letters to Harold Preece in early 1928.  “The fact is that life is simply a passing phase of this planet, not the real reason for the planet’s existence, but simply a result of its growth.  Life, and especially man’s life, is simply result then, and not a cause.  There may be, may be, I say, a real reason for the existence of matter and energy, but whatever that reason, that purpose is, man is no more essential to its culmination than any weed or tree.”  [Collected Letters, v. 1, p. 198]

Kull then comes to his senses to learn that he was attacked by an assassin and suffered a head wound.  The whole conversation, and the moving of the stars that Kull and the old man watched, took place within a matter of minutes.

This is by far one of the most philosophical Kull tales, if for no other reason than the philosophy takes up most of the story.  For some reason, Howard didn’t submit this one to Weird Tales, perhaps because Farnsworth Wright had already rejected some of the  Kull stories.  I don’t know if Wright’s rejections of those stories still exist.  I’m not aware that they do, but I have to wonder if he rejected them on the basis of too much philosophy and not enough action.  For whatever reason, Howard chose to send this one to Argosy.  They didn’t accept it, either, and “The Striking of the Gong” remained unpublished (in its original version) until 1976, when it was published in The Second Book of Robert E. Howard. 

Henry Kuttner’s Prince Raynor: The Citadel of Darkness

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Elak of Atlantis
Henry Kuttner
Planet Stories
$12.95, trade paperback, 224 pgs. 

This is the second and final tale of Prince Raynor that Kuttner wrote.  I don’t think it’s quite up to the standards of “Cursed be the City”, which I discussed earlier in the week.  But it’s still a good yarn.

The story opens with Raynor and his Nubian servant Eblik coming upon a dying archer in the forest.  He’s part of a group of refugees they, along with the warrior maid Delphia, had put together after the close of the previous story.  Prince Raynor’s horse had gone lame the previous day, and he and Eblik had fallen behind the group.  The archer is the only survivor except for Delphia, who has been kidnapped.  Raynor and Eblik set out in pursuit.

While waiting for the moon to rise, they are approached in the forest by an old man in a robe.  From his description, he sounds a lot like Gandalf, and his name, Ghiar, isn’t that far off.  Only this story predates The Lord of the Rings by a number of years. 

Ghiar tells them Delphia has been kidnapped by Baron Malric and gives them a talisman by which they can recover the girl.  There’s a lot of talk about the zodiac, but it’s a different zodiac from the one today.  The signs are different, and there are only seven of them.

Raynor and Eblik go to Malric’s castle and in the commotion of rescuing Delphia, Ghiar shows up and takes off with her.  Seems he needs her for a sacrifice in order to renew his youth.  Things get nicely weird when they arrive at Ghiar’s castle, which is on an island surrounded by black flowers.  Of course they’re the kind that induce sleep.  It’s only the thought of Eblik in danger that enables Raynor to overcome their effects. 

Once inside there are several fights and eventually they overcome Ghiar.  The manner is a little unconventional in that both magic and strength are used.  Ghiar’s motivation and actions don’t always make a lot of sense unless you remember his early speech about signs of the zodiac and which ones are in ascendance.

I liked the weird elements in this one, especially the battle with the serpent inside Ghiar’s castle and the consequences of that.  The black flowers were a nice touch, if not particularly original.  Both of these elements reminded me of Robert E. Howard (which is probably why I liked them).  It’s an established fact that Kuttner was influenced by Howard, and many of his early stories show the influence Howard as well as other writers in their contents.  Still, if you’re going to copy another writer, always copy from the best.

While the influence of Howard is definitely here, Kuttner by this time was too good of a writer to simply cut and paste another author’s style.  Kuttner shows a greater depth in the interactions between Raynor and Eblik than in “Cursed be the City”.  Early in the story Raynor calls him a fool and orders him about, something that would be entirely appropriate for a prince to do to a servant.  Still, when Eblik needs his aid, Raynor manages to find the motivation to save him where he wasn’t finding the motivation to save himself.

Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

The Raynor stories were both published in Strange Stories in 1939, which implies, given the delays between composition that were common in the pulps in those days, that the first of the two had to have been written in 1938.  Kuttner was beginning to transition at this time to science fiction, where he would ultimately write in collaboration with his wife C. L. Moore some of the great classics of the field such as “Mimsy Were the Borogoves”, “The Twonky”, “The Proud Robot”, and “Vintage Season.”  Just to name a few.  We’ll look at some of these in an in-depth post I’m working on.

It’s easy, and perhaps oversimplifying things, to say that Kuttner wrote no more Prince Raynor stories because the market folded.  Strange Stories only ran for 13 issues between 1939 and 1941.  But Weird Tales was still going strong.  I’ve seen somewhere, and I don’t recall where or I would say, that Dorothy McIlwraith didn’t like the Elak stories and wouldn’t buy any when she became editor of WT.  If I’m recalling correctly, the author of that statement was offering it as speculation.

I have a different idea.  Kuttner was trying to establish a professional writing career.  Weird Tales had a reputation, much deserved, for being slow in paying.  And not always paying that well.  There were a lot more science fiction markets than there were fantasy.  Kuttner didn’t restrict himself to just fantasy and science fiction, but also wrote weird menace and mysteries, and he continued to write fantasy for a number of years, especially for Unknown.  However, he had his greatest success in science fiction.  It seems to me, and this is just speculation, that Kuttner began to focus on writing more science fiction because he could make a better living at it.  The timing of the two heroic fantasy series ending coincides with an increase in Kuttner’s science fiction output and makes the possibility one that should be considered.

“The Citadel of Darkness” ends with the three companions, Raynor, Eblik, and Delphia, riding off together, one supposes to have more adventures.  It’s a shame Kuttner never recorded them. 

The Adventures Fantastic Interview: Mark Finn, Part 1

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Mark Finn should be no stranger to hard-core Robert E. Howard fans.  He is the author of the Howard biography Blood and Thunder as well as numerous articles and essays about the man from Cross Plains.  In addition to his writings about Robert E. Howard, Mark is also a fiction author with a number of short stories to his credit.  He took time out of his schedule recently to sit down with Adventures Fantastic to answer a few questions.  Here, in the first of two parts to this interview, Mark discusses why he writes, why he felt the need to write a biography of Robert E. Howard, his admiration of jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden, and what other projects he has in the works.
AF:  Why do you write?
MF:  Why do I write?  That’s a good question.  When I was a lot younger, I wanted to be an entertainer of some sort.  I went through a period where I remember in the 70s television would always have these variety shows, so I got to see ventriloquists and magicians, and guys who could do impressions, Rich Little.  I used to watch the Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts with Foster Brooks.  I didn’t understand why it was so funny, but my parents just thought it was the best thing ever.
AF:  I remember those.
MF:  Oh, they were so funny.  And Foster was great.  I mean really underappreciated kind of guy.  So I went through phases where I studied ventriloquism, and I studied magic.  I still play with magic on a strictly amateur basis right now.  But as I got older I wanted to do special effects makeup for the movies and found kind of accidentally that I was good at writing.  And I kept wanting to do other things.  I wanted to draw.  I’ve always wanted to tell stories.  I’ve always wanted to entertain people and tell stories.  However that needed to happen.  I found that of all the things I wanted to do, the thing that came easiest to me was writing.  If I spent a lot of time and went to school and learned art and got a degree in commercial art or graphic art and sat down and made an effort at getting into comics, I probably would be pretty good.  But I was always naturally better at writing than I was anything else, so by the time I was fifteen, I met somebody, incidentally, who was gifted in art the way I was in writing, so that’s what made me go, “Oh, I get it.  All right.”  And he and I have been friends, and he, John Lucas, has pursued the art career, and I’ve pursued the writing career.  For me it boils down to entertaining people, storytelling. I think that’s our primary means of communicating with one another, whether it’s a joke or “Honey, you won’t believe the day I’ve had.”  It’s all stories.  I like that form.
AF:  What got you interested in Robert E. Howard?

MF:  I was a nerd.  (laughs)  Yeah, in the 70s I liked all the monster movies, the Saturday afternoon stuff, Jason and the Argonauts.  It was the time of Star Wars and later fantasy movies and Dungeons and Dragons and all that stuff.  Dungeons and Dragons, when it came out, the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, had a list in the back of recommended reading.  That was interesting to me because I had been reading science fiction up until then.  I was just transitioning over into Edgar Rice Burroughs, and I got into D&D about the same time the Conan movie came out.  I was too young to go see it in the theater, but with a little finagling, when it came to HBO, I was able to watch it.  And so when I recognized that the Conan created by Robert E. Howard, according to the movie, was the same guy they were recommending the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons book, I said, “Well, I’ve clearly got to read this guy.”  And so it was through other influences that led me to check out Howard.  That’s been where my heart has been ever since.  Well, it just spoke to me in a way that very few other authors have before or since.  So, the short handed answer is through the movie, and the long handed answer is through Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and the movie.
AF:  This could be a two part question, depending on how you want to interpret it.  What led you to write a biography about Robert E. Howard, and why did you see a need for a revised edition?

MF:  My initial intention with writing Blood and Thunder was two-fold.  One, I knew that Rusty and Patrice [Rusty Burke and Patrice Louinet] were busy doing the Del Rey texts and preparing those and would have no time to finish these biographical projects and what they were doing in time for the Centennial [the centennial of Robert E. Howard’s birth] in 2006.  That just sort of happenstance coincided with Chris Roberson from Monkey Brain saying, “Isn’t the Howard Centennial coming up?”  And I said, “Yeah.”  And he said, “Do you want to do a book for us?”  And I said, “Sure, I’ll edit an anthology, and I’ll put everybody together, and we’ll do essays, and it’ll be great.”  And he said, “No, no, no, I’m thinking just you.”  That was when the idea first came to me.  I knew right away that I couldn’t do a kitchen sink, warts and all kind of book.  Those types of things take a while.  You’ve got to go three years in and really do a bunch of stuff.  I had a small window.  I had one year.  So I chose to write the biography I would have wanted to read, that I’ve always wanted to read as a fan, and couldn’t.  I wanted a biography that was easy to read.  Not simple, but an engaging story.  I wanted something that dealt with the literature that he wrote, and I wanted something to put it all into context.  There were things I emphatically did not get in reading Dark Valley Destiny.  In fact I decided to make that the critical yardstick, if you will, for Blood and Thunder.  I looked at everything I didn’t like about Dark Valley Destiny, and I either didn’t do what he [L. Sprague de Camp] did, or I wrote an answer for what he posited.  And so as a biography, it’s not a complete book in so much as it is a reaction to de Camp’s various theses.  And so when it came out, I had to turn it in at the end of 2005, beginning of 2006. 

Then in 2006, a bunch of things happened.  Most notably, The Cimmerian magazine that Leo Grin was doing went monthly, and with the monthly schedule came all these finds, all this new stuff.  That’s always the case, it’s never gonna be finished because if I wanted to stop right now and add new stuff, I could.  But I had to have a cut off point because of the process they were using to do the book.  There was a lot of stuff found in 2006, interesting speculations and some cool finds, subsequently, in 2007 and 2008, that weren’t in the first edition.  I made a deal with Monkey Brain for the mass market in trade.  So everybody was asking if there was going to be a hardcover.  I shopped it around to a few people, including Del Rey.  They liked the book, but it wasn’t in their cards to do it.  They were just really wanting to concern themselves with the fiction.  So I went to the Foundation [The Robert E. Howard Foundation] because, again, Rusty and Patrice are still working on their own stuff.  Patrice is still preparing texts.  They’ve got the boxing and the funny western stuff left to do.  So that’s somewhere between six and eight more books if they do it right.  Rusty, too, same thing.  So I knew that those biographies they’re gonna have are eventually going to come out.  But the Foundation could use a biography right now that they could market and sell, so I thought, I’ll just ask them.  But I wanted to put in the new information, I wanted to rewrite the last chapter, which is very problematic in the first edition.  I wanted to add a bunch of things people asked me about.  One of the few negative comments I got on the book was “I really liked learning about all the other stuff, but I kinda wish there were more Conan stuff in there.  He doesn’t spend a lot of time on Conan, aannndd I understand why, but it still would have been pretty nice.”  With that kind of luxury, with another year to go back through the manuscript, I can clean up a bunch of stuff.  Now it’s got 30,000 extra words in it.  And all those things have been addressed.  All the technical errors and lapses in concentration on my part have been fixed.  I’m very happy with it.  It’s a little weightier of a book.  The last chapter got completely reorganized and feels a whole lot more focused and less chaotic.  I would say probably four of the chapters at least have gotten a substantial revision or were completely revised.  Another four of the chapters had extra bits and pieces and things inserted into them, so if you’ve read the first edition once or twice, you’ll quickly start hitting stuff where you go, “I don’t remember that from the first time I read the book.”   Then you’ll go and get to the sections and go, “Wow, I don’t remember any of this.”  That’s the new stuff.

Illustration by Mark Schultz

AF:  Any possibility that you can foresee a third edition somewhere down the road, or is this your final word on Robert E. Howard’s life as far as a formal biography?
MF:  I would say, for everything that I wanted the book to accomplish, it largely did.  Now we have a talking point opposite de Camp’s book.  The thesis I wanted to work into the first edition regarding Breckenridge Elkins is now in there.  Unless some big evidence shows up that changes something fundamental, I don’t know that a third edition would need to come out.  I wouldn’t want to do it unless I could put another thirty thousand words into it, and if I put another thirty thousand words into it, now we start getting into an awful lot of lit crit.  Which is great if you’ve read it.  If I’m talking about Solomon Kane, if you’ve read all those stories, then a little literary criticism discussion, breaking stuff down isn’t going to hurt anybody.  You might agree or disagree,  You would at least be able to go, “Oh, yeah, ‘Wings of the Night,’ I’ve read that.”  If I put it in there, and you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re going to be more likely to skip chapters, which is exactly what I do when I read a literary biography and come across something I haven’t read yet because I don’t want to be pre-informed when I read the story.  So I don’t think a third edition is in the works anytime soon.  I would be more inclined to just do more articles and essays and fill in gaps that way.
AF:  Any other biographies you plan to write?

MF:  Weirdly enough, yes.  (laughs)  I want to do a biography of Jack Teagarden, who was a jazz trombonist during the Big Band era.  He’s from the town I currently live in, Vernon, Texas.  He’s the Jimi Hendrix of the jazz trombone.  That kind of sounds like a trite way to say it, but he played the trombone in a way that it was not played before or since.  His style was so singular and signature that jazz trombone died when he did.  And so he’s largely forgotten by modern jazz aficionados.  In the Big Band era, he was kinda on the second tier.  People have heard of him, go “Oh,yeah, I know that, trombone, right?” He’s got a pretty big international following still.  I recommend him.  If anybody is reading this, do a google search for him on Utube and check out how he plays.  The guy was a virtuoso.  The kind of which, you won’t believe what you’re hearing is a trombone.  He’s that good.  I want to do a biography of him.  I think he’s a fascinating guy.  He’s another one of those Texas creators who took two disparate things and combined them to make a unique sound.  I use him in the introduction to Blood and Thunder alongside of Howard Hughes and Bob Wills as inventive Texans who were able to take the best of two separate elements and combine them to make something new.  He’s one of those kind of guys, and I’m fascinated by those type of guys.  Historically, I’m attracted to subjects who displayed that kind of brilliance, maybe even to the cost of their own lives.  Orson Wells.  Benjamin Franklin.  Howard Hughes.  Harry Houdini. 

Robert E. Howard.  These guys, Jack Teagarden, all had this sort of intensity about them, this sort of effortless means of creation that was responsible for why they were the way the were but also made them so flawed and so tragic.  I don’t have a timeline on the biography.  I’m waiting for a bunch of stuff to come together.  I’m probably through writing biographies for a few years.  I really want some time to study Teagarden more before I get into it.  But, yeah, I definitely want to tackle him.  Now I have to be mindful of something.  I do not remember who said this, but there’s a very famous quote from a critic.  I should now who said this.  The quote is writing about music is a lot like dancing about architecture.  I’ve got to find a way to write about his stuff, maybe not in a way that you understand it, but in a way that makes you want to listen to it.  That’s really the goal.  If you’re a jazz fan and you pick up the book, I’ve got to be able to write about what he’s doing in a way that the jazz fan will say “Yeah, he totally nailed it.”  And you, who have never heard him at all, will go, “I don’t what he’s talking about but, man, I got to check that out.”  And that’s a balancing act.  Who knows how long that’s going to take?

AF:  I enjoyed your novel excerpt that you read earlier this morning.  What fiction do you have in the pipeline, and where can someone go to get copies of what you’ve already head published?
MF:  I’ve got two…I’ve got a bunch of stuff in the pipeline, actually.  I’ve got a lot of neat stuff coming out this year.  I just wrapped up a script for Dark Horse for their Howard theme anthology entitled Robert E. Howard’s Savage Sword.  It’s an original story about El Borak, Francis Xavier Gordon.  I’m really excited about it because it’s the first comic book appearance of El Borak.  As such it’s also a kind of an introduction to the character for people who don’t know who he is.  This will get picked up by a lot of people who’ve maybe read Conan, Solomon Kane, even Kull. and might be curious to try this.  I’ve only got eight pages in it, so I basically have got to provide you with a sort of …I think of it as a fictional essay, really, on what makes him so cool.  Eight pages isn’t enough adapt an original story.  It isn’t enough to get into a richly detailed plot, so I came up with an incident.  So we basically decided as long as we have eight pages of El Borak doing the things that we know he can do best, it’ll be pretty cool.  That comes out in May.  The novels I’m working on, I’ve got two in progress. 
The Domino Chronicles has been shopped to a couple of people.  I’m not sure if I’m gonna get any bites any time soon. 

The other thing I’ve been working on, I’ve been researching this guy for years, and I’ve finally got the means to put it into a novel form.  It’s about Sailor Tom Sharkey, who was an actual golden age boxer from the turn of the century.  The story involves him and his adventures.  He was a very larger than life character, and the model for Robert E. Howard’s Sailor Steve Costigan, at least in terms of physicality and fighting ability.  So for me, what I like about that story is I’ve loved the funny boxing stories for forever.  That’s no secret to anybody who’s met me for more than five minutes.  And as much as I want to go play in that sandbox, I really have a problem with pastiche authors, particularly the ones who don’t get it.  Or “I want to do my thing with Conan.”  Well, if you do your thing with Conan, why don’t you go do something else?  So I decided that what I wanted to do was something in the funny boxer genre, but not necessarily a Robert E. Howard turn.  Because Howard’s sense of humor is not my sense of humor.  My sense of humor is different.  And it would be bad for me to try and imitate Howard’s sense of humor.  This gave me an opportunity to do something really funny in stories with this unreliable narrator, kind of a la Steve Costigan, but not a direct rip off.  We’re dealing with somebody who’s at the end of his life or he’s in the twilight of his career and he’s looking back and regretting some decisions he’s made.  He decides to go on this vaudeville circuit, which actually happened. What he doesn’t realize is that the vaudeville circuit train he gets on turns out to be a quest for a golden belt he left back in New York City.  Things get pretty weird after that.  By doing a kind of fantastical historical, that’s something that Howard never did either.  His funny boxing stories are pretty straight up.  Definitely it owes a great debt to that work, but ultimately I’ve moved to where I feel far enough away from it that, again, only people who’ve read the boxing stories will go, “You know, that was a Costigan flourish.”  I think everybody else is gonna read it and go, “Where the hell did you come up with this guy?”  And I’m gonna have to tell them, he’s straight out of history.  That’s a work in progress.  I hope to have that done this year and shopped around. 

If you want a taste of it, we’ve got a short story collection coming out here that will be ready before Howard Days.  It’s called Dreams in the Fire:  Fiction and Poetry Inspired by Robert E. Howard.  It’s actually a REHUPA project.  Current and former REHUPAns have donated stories to this anthology.  And we got a couple of ringers in there.  Bob Weinberg did a story for us; Don Herron has a good poem in there.  The whole thing is a fiction anthology in the vein of Robert E. Howard.  Everybody had different characters and different concepts.  We’ve got some pirate stuff.  We’ve got some American frontier stuff.  We’ve a Sailor Tom Sharkey story.  All kinds of things.  The entire book will be sold online, through the usual outlets, also through the gift shop [at the Robert E. Howard House].  And all the money goes to Project Pride.  So it’s going to be our fundraiser book from REHUPA.  And we’ll keep that active for a year, and all the profits we’re going to give over to the Howard House to let them continue the good work and keep the place up.  So hopefully I’ll have that out by mid-May, if not sooner.  That’s in the final stages.  Really, right now between the novels and some more comic work that’s coming down the pipe, I’ll have quite a few things out this year.  I’m looking forward to having all this out and published. 

Next Week:  In part 2 of this interview, Mark discusses adaptations of Howard to film, the state of Robert E. Howard scholarship today, and what one question he would ask Howard if he could.

Henry Kuttner’s Prince Raynor: Cursed be the City

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Elak of Atlantis
Henry Kuttner
Planet Stories
trade paperback, 221, $12.99

In addition to the four Elak stories collected in this book, the only two stories Kuttner wrote about Prince Raynor are also included.  These stories were published in Strange Stories, a rival of Weird Tales published by Better Publications.  Started in 1939, this pulp was often seen at the time as a dumping ground for stories rejected by Weird Tales.  It only lasted until 1941.

In a way I prefer the Prince Raynor tales to those of Elak.  They are set in a more recent prehistory, one in which the ancient kingdoms we know existed are beginning to take shape, rather than some mythical past. As a result, any anachronisms are less glaring.  Also, the prose is leaner and more polished than in some of the early Elak tales, especially the first one, “Thunder in the Dawn”.

Both “Cursed be the City” and its sequel, “The Citadel of Darkness”, open with quotes from something  called “The Tale of Sakhmet the Damned”.  What this is exactly, we’re never told, nor does anyone named Sakhmet ever appear.  It’s a nice touch, though.

The story opens with the fall of Sardopolis, capital city of the kingdom of Gobi.  The king is killed by the conqueror Cyaxeres, and the king’s son Prince Raynor is taken to the dungeon to be tortured.  Cyaxares has a companion and adviser, Necho, who may not be human.  Raynor is rescued by his Nubian friend and servant Eblik.  Together they make their way to the temple of Ahmet.  There a dying priest tells them that when Sardopolis was founded, a great forest god was displaced, but it was prophesied that he would one day return to set up his altar again in the ruins of Sardopolis.  That day is at hand.  Raynor and Eblik are given the task of going to a group of bandits led by the Reaver of the Rock and informing them of the fall of Sardopolis.  They’ve been waiting for generations for the old god to return.

Cyaxares’ men follow them.  The Reaver and his men stay to fight.  Raynor and Eblik, guided by the Reaver’s daughter Delphia, a formidable fighter in her own right, take a talisman to free the forest god.  Most readers will recognize the name of the forest god.

The story moves well and has a satisfying, if not exactly upbeat, resolution.  In fact, the story ends on a pretty dark note.

Kuttner continues to break from pulp conventions here.  Eblik is more than just a black sidekick, and Delphia takes an active role in the events.  The tone and feel of this story, as well as that of “The Citadel of Darkness”, is much more Howard-esque than the Elak stories.  In those, Kuttner tended to play the sidekick Lycon for comic relief.  None of Howard’s fantasy heroes had true sidekicks, although at times they had companions, who were treated as equals.  In the Prince Raynor stories, while Eblik may be a servant, and upon occasion is reminded that he is, he’s still portrayed as a companion, not a stereotype to be played for laughs.  This was an uncommon portrayal of someone of African descent in the pulps of this era.

By this time C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry had made her appearance, so a strong active woman wasn’t exactly groundbreaking.  Still, to cast Delphia as a competent fighter and one of the leaders of the bandits was a departure from the typical standards of the day.

So to sum up, if, as some have stated, Kuttner was trying to fill the void in sword and sorcery stories left by Robert E. Howard’s death, I think he succeeded more with Prince Raynor than with Elak.  It’s unfortunate that he only wrote two stories featuring the character.  We’ll look at the other tale in a future post.

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Odds and Ends

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Between allergies, taxes, and trying to finish my upcoming column for Home of Heroics, I’m a little behind in getting some things up that I’ve been working on.  It might be next week before anything substantial is posted since I’ll be traveling over the weekend starting tomorrow.  In the meantime, check out the new material at Home of Heroics if you aren’t already doing so.  Yesterday’s guest column was by John O’Neill, publisher of Black Gate, in which he talked about how Scholastic Books got him hooked on science fiction and fantasy.  It brought back memories for me, because I used to read those books as well.  My son is now starting to read them, and I’m looking forward to what he’s going to be bringing home.

I want to take a moment to thank everyone who’s visited Adventures Fantastic, especially in the last couple of weeks.  Traffic seems to be picking up, and I appreciate your interest, support, and comments.  I’ve got some cool things planned for the next couple of months, including a two-part interview with Robert E. Howard scholar Mark Finn, some Long Looks at Short Fiction, a review of Jasper Kent’s Thirteen Years Later, a look at Henry Kuttner’s Prince Raynor stories, and some more Kull.  So stick around.  It’s only gonna get better.

E-Book Prices: A Not-So-Brief Rant

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Ok, the main point of this post is to vent my spleen.  I’m not sure what good it will do other than perhaps get some frustration out of my system.  But if you’re reading this, you’re probably among the people who would most understand.

I was browsing in the local Barnes and Noble over the weekend.  There were a number of books there in multiple genres that looked intriguing (no big surprise).  One in particular seemed to be a really good fit for this blog.  It was a new release in mass market paperback, and no, I’m not going to tell you the title.  I’ll refrain out of respect to the author.  You’ll see why in a minute.  It appeared to be something that would move quickly to the top of the TBR pile, both because it looked like something I would really enjoy as well as something the people who read this blog would be interested in.

Now, before I go any further, you need to understand something to get some context.

After moving to the house where we currently live, we had to make a decision about what to put in storage since this house is considerably smaller than the previous one.  Over half my library is currently in boxes.  Much of what isn’t probably should be for the simple reason that I don’t have much space.  As in literally none.  I don’t have room in the house to bring more books in.  The shelves are spilling over, and my wife is starting to complain about tripping over the stacks on the floor.  Which is why I got an ereader, specifically a Nook, because B&N is just down the road.  When I buy a paper book, I need to clear space by either taking one (or some) to storage, selling them, or giving them to friends.  I will still buy paper books from a few writers, either because those writers are ones I want to read in physical copies or because I want them signed.  Also, there are some books that don’t have electronic editions, especially if they’re from small presses.  But with those exceptions, all of my book buying for the foreseeable future needs to be in electronic format.

I’ve got my Nook with me at B&N, so I check to see if there’s an electronic edition of this particular book.  Yep, sure enough, there is.

It costs the same as the paper edition.

Which means it will cost me more than the paper edition, because with a B&N card, I get a discount on the paper copy.  While annoying, it’s not so surprising.  I don’t have a problem with a business model in which electronic copies are similar or even identical in price to the paper copies initially, with the electronic copies dropping  in price over the course of the next few months.  I probably won’t buy the electronic copies until they’ve dropped in price.   Not just because I’m cheap, but I’m so far behind on my reading that usually it takes a couple of months before most new books rise to the top of the TBR pile.  So why not wait and pay the lower price?  If I want the book so badly that I buy it when it’s first published, it’s probably one I would want in paper.

But that model not what I see happening.  Most of the major houses that I’ve checked aren’t lowering the price of the ebooks after a few months, at least not by very much.  Now, I admit I haven’t done anything even approximating a scientific survey.  But looking at the things I read and the types of books I buy, I don’t see a lot publishers pricing their electronic copies much differently than their paper copies.  (Angry Robot seems to be an exception.)  For example, I would love to have the Del Rey Robert E. Howard collections in electronic format.  That way I could read whichever story I wanted to wherever I am as long as I have the Nook with me.  All of them as of this writing are either $12.99 or $13.99.  The exception is the newest collection, Sword Woman, which is only $9.99.  I have no idea why that one is priced so low now, because I bought it electronically when it was published a few months ago and paid $12.99.  And, yes, I hear what you’re saying:  I can get other electronic editions of Howard’s work.  But I want the Del Rey editions because those are the ones that have the corrected texts, the alternate drafts, and the fragments, as well as other material.  My point is I think these books are priced a little high.

I realize supply and demand, author popularity in other words, comes into play.  I’m okay with that.  A publisher expecting someone to pay more for a popular author than for an unknown is not unreasonable.  That’s the way the free market works.  It’s not just someone like Howard, an author has been around for a while and has a solid fan base that isn’t going to go away, whose books are being overpriced.  I’ve looked at a number of titles from a variety of publishers, and most of them are priced the same as the paper editions or maybe a dollar less.  (I’m talking mass market paperbacks here; electronic versions of books only available in hardcover are usually about half the hardcover price.  But hardcovers are luxury items.)  And not all of these titles are recent.  And not all of the authors are well known.  There are several first novels that look appealing by people I’ve never heard of before that have the same price in electronic and paper formats.

Before you conclude I’m one of these people who think ebooks should be priced at one or two dollars, I’m not.  I don’t have a problem paying between $5 and $10 for an electronic version of a book, although I naturally prefer the lower end of that range, provided the paper copy is considerably more expensive.  I see no reason to pay the same price for an electronic book as I do a paper copy, no matter what the price is on the paper copy.  There’s no reason I should.  There’s still editing, copy-editing, layout, cover art, and similar costs no matter what the format.  These all need to be taken into account when pricing the book, which is why I don’t think one or two bucks is a reasonable price for many ebooks, especially those coming from major publishers.  But there’s no printing costs, no shipping costs, no warehousing costs for electronic books.  I find it hard to believe a dollar difference between electronic books and paper books covers all the cost of printing, shipping, warehousing, etc.  The publishers shouldn’t expect me to pay for the rent on their Manhattan offices by gouging me on the price of the ebook.

If most of the difference in production costs between electronic and paper books went to the author, I would have a different opinion.  But it doesn’t, and so neither do I.  See J. A Konrath’s analysis for some numbers to get an idea of how much money most authors see on your average ebook compared to how much the publishers get. 

So I find  book I want to read, one that has an electronic version priced at or near the price of the paper version.  I have some choices.  I buy the paper copy, but with the spatial and spousal limitations I have, that’s not an option I can use very often.  Let’s assume it’s not in this case, which is a safe assumption.  I can buy the ebook, and sell out my principles, letting the publisher manipulate me to pay a price I think is too high.  I have a really difficult time doing that.  Or I can take what’s behind door number three, as they used to say on the game show Let’s Make a Deal.  I can pass on buying the book and wait for a copy to show up in a used book store.

That last would be my default option except for one thing.  There’s a writer who won’t get paid for the book.  As an aspiring writer myself, I have as big a problem with that as with the first two options.  I realize not everyone does.  If the average book buyer thinks the cost of an ebook is too high, they won’t buy it.  There’s more than enough to read out there that’s priced lower. More good and interesting stuff than any one person can ever read in an entire lifetime.  With the internet connecting second hand book dealers with customers miles away, a reader can find the book he or she wants at a lower price by exercising a little patience.

And that’s where I think big publishing is going to hurt itself.  By pricing itself out of the market.  Publishing is very much a free market right now in the sense that customers have power and the publishers don’t.  We have power, like I stated, to wait, read something else, or get it used.  That power is only going to increase as more authors begin to self-publish, both backlist titles and new books, and price their books significantly below what publishers are charging.  Readers are going to expect a certain price range on books, and books outside that range aren’t going to sell.  With the cost of fuel rising and driving everything else up along with it, book buying is going to become more of a luxury.  I know it is for me.  That means that higher priced ebooks are going to be less attractive to readers.  And the trend will probably get a lot worse before it gets better.

We need more variety in fantasy and science fiction, in detective fiction and historical adventure.  Not less.  There’s too much lowest common denominator crap on the shelves as it is.  That means more writers need a way to get their books to readers and still make enough to keep writing.  That won’t happen if their books, print or electronic, don’t sell.  The publishers will drop them like hot rocks.  And more voices will be silenced. More careers will end far too early.  And everyone, readers and authors and publishers, will all be the poorer for it.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what I decided about that book I really want to read and review for you here?  I’m still thinking about it.

Cool Stuff at Rogue Blades’ Home of Heroics

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There have been a couple of posts up at Home of Heroics, the new feature on the Rogue Blades Entertainment site, the last few days.  Friday Bruce Durham reviewed Howard Andrew Jones‘ Desert of Souls.  This morning, Luke Forney surveyed the graphic adaptations of Robert E. Howard’s work, including Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, and Red Sonja.  Interesting stuff, so check it out if you haven’t already.

Charles Saunders Guest Blogs at Home of Heroics

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Wednesdays at Home of Heroics is the day for guest blogs.  For the inaugural guest blog,  Charles Saunders, author of Imaro, has written a thought provoking piece on the role of fear in the heart of a hero.  He looks at three examples:  Robert E. Howard’s Conan, Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane, and his own Imaro.  Check it out. 

The Noseless Horror

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Tales of Weird Menace
Robert E. Howard
The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press
473 p., $45 REHF members, $50 nonmembers

Tales of Weird Menace collects the, what else, weird menace stories of Robert E. Howard.  The centerpiece of the volume is Skull-Face.  Since I’ve written at length about that tale,we’ll go on to the second.

This is “The Noseless Horror”.  It’s a brief tale, and in the interest of fair warning, I should tell you I’m going to include spoilers in this discussion.  The plot is pretty simple.  The narrator, called only Slade, and John Gordon are spending the night at the isolated country manor of Sir Thomas Cameron, noted Egyptotologist.  Whether this is the same John Gordon who has such a prominent role in Skull-Face isn’t clear, but it’s highly  unlikely.  This Gordon is described as a wealthy sportsman, whereas the Gordon of Skull-Face is a government agent. The only other person at the house is the Sikh servant Ganra Singh, who lost his nose to an Afghan sword.  There’s also a Ganra Singh in Skull-Face, but he’s not the one here.  The descriptions and backgrounds are too different, plus the Ganra Singh in Skull-Face still has his nose intact.

Much of the conversation revolves around Sir Thomas tricking a rival, Gustavve von Honmann, with a phony map.  As a result of following the map, Von Honmann was killed by a tribe in central Africa.  According to the one porter who managed to escape, he vowed he would have revenge on Sir Thomas, from this side of the grave or the other.  Sir Thomas isn’t frightened, and moves the conversation to the real reason he had asked the men to his home.

 

Sir Thomas tells Gordon and Slade that he is about to announce a major find and wants their input on some details first.  The find concerns a mummy found in the hinterlands of Upper Egypt that was embalmed in an unusual way.  None of the internal organs were removed.  As Slade and Gordon are preparing for bed, they hear a scream from Sir Thomas’ study. 

They arrive in time to hear Sir Thomas’ final words, “Noseless–the noseless one”, before he falls over dead with a dagger in his heart.  Ganra Singh joins them minutes later.  Of course, Gordon immediately accuses Ganra Singh of the murder despite the fact that Ganra Singh’s clothes are not disheveled nor is there any blood on them.  Slade is not so sure of Ganra Singh’s guilt, and Gordon, after locking Ganra Singh in another room, agrees to consider other possibilities.

Slade searches the house while Gordon stays in the study to look for clues.  He actually says that.  Up until this point, the story reads like a combination gothic/English country house mystery.  It’s not until Slade is returning to the study after finding an empty mummy case in Sir Thomas’ private museum that he spies the shadow of Ganra Singh on the wall.  Slade is terrified and understands something of what could have driven Sir Thomas mad just before he died.  At this point, we’re back in familiar Howard territory, more of a horror story than a weird menace in my opinion. 

While Slade was searching the building, both men heard a crash and assumed it was caused by the other.  They investigate to find that Ganra Singh has escaped.  After searching the building, they see a light coming from under Ganra Singh’s room.  How they know this to be his room is not explained.  The light is caused by roaring fire in the fireplace.  Inside Gordon and Slade discover not Ganra Singh but the missing mummy, which, like Ganra Singh, has no nose.  The mummy attacks, shattering Slade’s shoulder, and is in the process of breaking Gordon’s back across a heave table when Ganra Singh shows up.  By his own brute force Ganra Singh is able to shove the mummy into the fire, destroying. Gordon responds by fainting.

While Ganra Singh is binding Slade’s wounds, we learn that Ganra Singh escaped in order to prove his innocence and find the true killer.  Gordon apologizes for doubting him and gives him one of the highest compliments possible in Howard’s fiction, calling him “a real man.”  Gordon tells the other two men that the mummy wasn’t found in the hinterlands of Egypt, but instead Sir Thomas brought it back from much closer to the center of the continent, on the edge of the territory where Von Honmann was killed.  As the mummy burned in the flames, Gordon saw its face change to Von Homann’s.

This story works, although it’s not one of Howard’s best, and it works primarily because of Howard’s ability to tell a tale.  It begins as an apparent attempt to be either a detective story or a traditional country house mystery.  The “mystery” is entirely too predictable.  About halfway through the tone changes and becomes one of creeping horror and then action, things Howard excelled at.  It’s at the end, when Gordon is explaining things, that Howard returns to the form of a traditional mystery, in which the detective explains to the remaining suspects how he deduced who dunnit.  Howard attempted some detective and mystery stories, but he never really felt comfortable with them.  Often he would introduce elements of the genre he was trying to write into a genre story he was comfortable with.  As an example, one of the early Conan stories, “The God in the Bowl” is a police procedural in a fantasy setting.  This looks like an attempt on his part to mix horror with mystery/detection.

A popular pastime, usually among the uninformed but occasionally among people who should know better, is to criticize Howard for his approach to race.  This story is a perfect example that such individuals don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.  The narrator refuses to accept  that the nonwhite character is automatically the killer, instead wanting to see proof, and tries to find evidence to clear him.  Furthermore, Howard makes him the real hero of the story, saving the lives of the white guys.  What’s racist about that?  Nothing; in fact it’s remarkably progressive for its time.  Gordon displays the typical racial attitudes for a man of his day.  He not only gets shown up for it, he’s also the only one who faints, and then later apologizes for his attitudes. 

One thing bears considering here, and that’s the similarities between “The Noseless Horror” and Skull-Face.  Both have strong heroic characters named John Gordon.  Both involved evil beings with grotesque appearances found in mummy cases.   Both have Sikh characters named Ganra Singh, although the two Sikhs are clearly not the same person.  I don’t know when “The Noseless Horror” was written nor have I had any luck in finding a probable composition date, but my guess, and this is only a guess, is that it precedes Skull-Face in composition.  It wasn’t unusual for Howard to play around with variations on different characters names.  He may have tried out the names in “The Noseless Horror” before going on to write Skull-Face. Certainly the latter is a more polished and ambitious work.  And it would make no sense to give characters in a later story the same names as characters in a published story when those characters aren’t the same individuals.

I don’t know if Howard submitted “The Noseless Horror” anywhere or not.  In a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith written sometime in February 1929, Howard provides a list of most of the stories he had submitted up to that time [Collected Letters, vol.1, 1923-1929, REH Foundation Press, pp. 306-312].  “The Noseless Horror” isn’t listed, although Skull-Face is.  In the letter Howard mentions that he left out “four or five stories” plus a number he didn’t finish or submit.  I suspect “The Noseless Horror” was among these.  That would certainly be consistent with the suggestion Howard wrote “The Noseless Horror” for prior to Skull-Face and never submitted it anywhere.  It wasn’t published until 1970 in the February issue of the Magazine of Horror.  If anyone does know when this story was written, I’d appreciate your letting me know.

“The Noseless Horror”, like I said, isn’t one of Howard’s best and may very well have been an unsuccessful experiment in writing in the vein of an English mystery.  Unsuccessful in terms of its being that type of mystery.  Still, it’s worth a read and no matter what it attempts to be, it succeeds as an entertaining yarn.