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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.
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.
The Cloud RoadsWhat’s that, you say? You haven’t read Martha Wells?
Shame on you.
You’ve been missing out. And The Cloud Roads is the perfect place to find out what you’ve been missing. It’s a stand-alone, at least so far, although I hope it doesn’t stay that way.
This is a dense, complexly layered novel. And that’s a good thing. The story concerns Moon, an orphan who doesn’t know who or what he is. Moon is a shape-shifter, able to take either the winged form you see on the gorgeous cover, or a humanoid shape called a groundling because it’s wingless. In his wanderings since his family was killed, he’s never come across any others of his kind. The closest he’s come is a race called the Fell, who look a lot like his winged form. Only the Fell are feared and hated by everyone. They have the nasty tendency to move in, destroy a city, and eat the inhabitants. Not exactly the best of neighbors; when the Fell move in, there really does go the neighborhood.
Not wanting to be mistaken for a Fell, Moon usually masquerades as a groundling, only taking to his winged form when no one is around. Unfortunately, someone is, and he’s nearly killed before being rescued by another of his kind who has been watching him.
The other is Stone, and he’s amazed that Moon is alone. He tells Moon he’s a Raksura. They live in a colonies, like ants or bees, and have queens, warriors, and several other castes. Moon is one of the consort caste. Stone is also a consort, albeit a much older one than Moon. Stone’s colony is dying, and he’s been searching for more consorts to come and join it. And Moon is the only one he’s found.
And that’s when the fun really starts. Colony politics, at least in Stone’s colony, are multi-layered, and the role Moon is expected to play is not an easy one.
And that’s all I’m going to say. Part of the enjoyment of this novel was seeing how Wells unwrapped the culture of the colony, as well as the world, like an onion. The further I read, the more depth there was. There are enough characters for a Fat Fantasy. Martha Wells does more with character development in less than 300 pages than many other writers do in twice as many pages. Or even a thousand pages.
I wrote a few weeks ago about how I thought fantasy these days has more sense of wonder than science fiction. This book proves my point. This is a fascinating world, and I want to see more of it. (Please, Martha.) Her next book is titled The Serpent Sea, and will be coming out from Night Shade sometime next year. I hope it’s set in this same world. There are a number of races, not all of them humanoid, but none of the ones that were could really be called humans. They all had slightly different traits. Some had scales, some horns or tusks, some tails or claws. I couldn’t help but be reminded of Larry Niven’s Ringworld and it’s sequels, in which a number of different races inhabit a huge artificial world, with different races living in different areas. At times The Cloud Roads had that feel to it. A vast world waiting to be explored. We don’t see details of all the cultures, but they’re there in the ones we see up close. We get hints of an ancient history that seems to have been forgotten by much of the population. This was a fascinating place to visit.
I would also love to see this book filmed. With the technology used in Avatar, this would be spectacular. And this time the movie would actually have a story, not a plot outline of something that has been done a thousand times. The shape-shifting would be mind-blowing. And the aerial combat scenes….the mind boggles.
Which brings me to another point. There’s plenty of action in this book, the majority of it in the air. Martha Wells does action and adventure oriented fantasy like few people do. Her plots are complex, and so are her characters. The action and fight scenes move things along quickly, and it’s never dull.
To sum up. The Cloud Roads was one of the most enjoyable full-length novels I’ve read in a long time. The only other one I’ve read recently that comes close is Twelve, and that was such a different book that it’s hard to compare the two. So buy and read The Cloud Roads. And Martha Wells’ others if you haven’t already. You won’t be disappointed.
Kull: Exile of Atlantis
Robert E. Howard
Del Rey
trade paperback, $17.00, 317 p.
This is the first of four extremely short stories in the annals of Kull, or at least first in the order of arrangement in this volume. This one is different from any of the Kull stories that have come before it. It was submitted to Weird Tales, but Farnsworth Wright obviously didn’t care for it since it wasn’t published until 1967 in the Lancer Books volume King Kull.
The tale opens with Kull listening to Brule, his chancellor Tu, Ka-nu the Pictish ambassador, and the slave and scholar Kathulos discussing philosophy (nothing new there). Kathulos is saying that what we perceive as reality is an illusion. To make his point, he gives an example of sound and silence, saying that sound is the absence of silence, while silence is the absence of sound. Kathulos mentions that Raama, the greatest sorcerer who ever lived, thousands of years ago locked a primordial silence in a castle in order to save the universe.
When Brule mentions the castle is in Valusia and he’s seen it, the comment gets Kull’s attention. He decides he wants to see the place. Although the other try to dissuade him, he takes them and a hundred of the elite Red Slayers with him. They find the castle on a hill after days of riding around looking for it. How the kingdom continues to run or why Brule doesn’t remember the location of the castle is never explained.
As they approach the castle, Kull can sense waves of silence emanating from it. The only door is sealed. Next to the door is a gong, green in color and varying in its depths, sometimes seeming to be quite deep and at other times appearing shallow. Despite the warnings carved on the castle, Kull breaks the bonds.
What rushes out is a palpable silence that knocks all but Kull to the ground. The men are all screaming, but no sound proceeds from their mouths. Sensing the silence wants to destroy all life, Kull tries to resist the silence but eventually staggers and falls. As he does so, he strikes the gong. Although he can’t hear it ring, Kull senses the silence draw back. He takes the gong from its stand and begins to ring it, forcing the silence into the castle and eventually destroying it. This is a pretty good trick since not even Raama was unable to destroy this silence. The silence screams as it dies.
And that’s all there is to this one. It has some unique points. For starters, Kull finds his usual weapons, in this case his sword, useless against a malevolent silence. He is forced to use his brains rather than his brawn. For Kull that’s not too much of a stretch since he uses his brain on a regular basis. It was nice to read that something other than a blade is needed every once in a while.
There’s nothing remarkable about the prose, at least by Howard’s standards. It’s good, serviceable, and pulls the reader in. It’s just not his best. Even so, it’s still better than most of his imitators have done when they were hitting on all cylinders.
The appearance of Kathulos provided the right amount of philosophy needed as a framework to get the action moving. Howard was reading a lot of philosophy during this period, as evidenced by his correspondence that has come down to us. I may slow down this series of posts in order to research some of the philosophers who were influencing his work. Or I might devote an entire post just to that. We’ll see. Time constraints will determine that.
This is the second and last story in which Kathulos will appear. The sorcerer who manipulated him, Thulsa Doom, never appears again in the Kull stories, at least in none of the ones written by Howard. (I’m not going to consider the comics here.) For the Lancer Books edition of King Kull, Lin Carter “finished” an untitled draft, eliminated all references to Karon the Ferryman (!), had Felgar be Thulsa Doom in disguise, and called it “Riders Beyond the Sunrise”. But the more we discuss Carter’s violations of Howard’s works, the more we legitimize them, so that’s the last we’ll talk about Carter in this post.
Like I stated, this is one of the shortest of the Kull stories. In some ways it’s one of the more interesting ones because of the nature of the villain Kull has to defeat. It certainly adds variety to the series.
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.
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.
