It’s Tuesday evening as I write this and in 48 hours, I’ll be in Cross Plains for Howard Days 2015, which officially kicks off on Friday. I’ll provide a report next week. In the meantime, I thought I would inquire as to what any of you any of you might like me to pay particular attention to. The theme this year is the relationship between Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft.
Anyway, if you can’t make it and like me to report on something in particular, please let me know.
Swords of the North
Robert E. Howard
The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press
$50 nonmember, $45 members
Robert E. Howard was enamored of the Celts, so I thought I would look at a pair of stories featuring his Irish pirate, Cormac Mac Art. Cormac is an Irishman who has been banished from the Emerald Isle. He’s thrown his lot in with a group of Vikings led by Wulfhere, a giant of a man. Cormac resembles a Conan prototype in the way he is described. He’s got the haircut, and whereas the rest of the Norsemen are bearded, or at least mustached, Cormac is clean shaven.
These two stories are straight historical fiction without any fantastic elements. They’re still solid pieces of writing, full of battle and carnage, with a few twists thrown in. Continue reading
Hippocampus Press sent out an email yesterday saying that the last day to purchase A Means to Freedom, the collected correspondence of H. P. Lovercraft and Robert E. Howard will be tomorrow. After that, licensing agreements expire, and the book will be out of print and available only on the secondary market. Where it will be much more expensive. Here’s what they said.
Due to low stock and the end of our license term, the last day to purchase A MEANS TO FREEDOM: THE LETTERS OF H. P. LOVECRAFT AND ROBERT E. HOWARD will be Saturday, February 28th. After that date, this work will only be available on the secondary market, and not from Hippocampus Press. It’s been a good run and we have probably reached the intended audience, so a future reprint is unlikely.
So if you were planning on buying a copy, act fast. Or be prepared to shell out the bucks later.
Black God’s Kiss
C. L. Moore
Paizo
trade paperback $12.99
Shortly after she began chronicling the adventures of Northwest Smith, C. L. Moore created a second series character, one that would have an even greater impact on the genre. I’m talking, of course, about Jirel of Joiry.
Instead of setting these stories in space like she did with Northwest Smith, or in some age before the dawn of recorded history, like Howard did with Conan, Moore chose to place Jirel in the fictional French kingdom of Joiry, square in the Middle Ages.
There were only five Jirel stories, plus the Jirel and Northwest Smith team-up “Quest of the Starstone” that she wrote with her husband Henry Kuttner. But for the first time in the history of the field, here was a female character who was worthy of her own series. Note: the rest of this post will contain spoilers. Continue reading
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robert E. Howard. For someone who wrote for the pulps, which were considered by many to be barely above subliterate trash during their heyday, he’s got a remarkable legacy.
His books are still being reprinted, with new ones coming out on a regular basis. Howard has been the subject of multiple biographies. A foundation has been formed in his name that gives a scholarship to a graduating senior each year. His work has been adapted to film. (Okay, not necessarily adapted well or faithfully, but it at least has been adapted.) He wrote some of the seminal works in the field of sword and sorcery, works that have been widely imitated for decades. And his collected letters reveal a young man whose mind and imagination were too big for the narrow confines of his small Texas town.
How many best-sellers from his era can you name beyond the obvious ones of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Parker, and Hemingway? How many works of “serious literature” that bravely explore “the human condition” and promote social justice from as little as ten years ago, never mind two or three decades back, are still in print or even remembered?
Howard wrote with a passion, but then there weren’t many things Howard didn’t approach passionately, at least things he chose rather than had thrust on him, such as nonwriting jobs. His ideas and passions came through in his writing. That’s part of what makes so much of his work, whether fiction or poetry or correspondence, both fun and deep. Too many of today’s crusaders for [insert cause du jour here] need to take some time and study Howard’s works and see how it’s done. Howard communicates things like his views on barbarism, civilization, honor, loyalty, etc., clearly and unambiguously without ever interfering with his narrative or throwing the reader out of his story. Would that we had more like him writing today.
So take a moment today and remember him. Raise a glass in his honor. Spend some time in one of his worlds. With snow overnight and more expected for the rest of the day, I’ll read some more in Swords of the North myself. It’s a fitting day to immerse myself in that Northern thing.
Howard Andrew Jones has posted a solid tribute here.
The index and addenda to The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard arrived today. It probably won’t be of much interest to the casual reader, but it’s a highly useful tool to the serious (and not so serious) scholar. In addition to the much needed index, the book also contains 17 letters and drafts that were not known at the time the Collected Letters was published.
Pricing and ordering information are here. Of course, members of the Robert E. Howard Foundation get a discount.
Kudos to Bobby Derie for putting the index together. It was a lot of work.
Today marks the 122nd anniversary of Clark Ashton Smith’s birth. He was one of the Big Three of Weird Tales, the other two being H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard (but then I probably don’t need to tell you that).
Like Howard, Smith was also a poet as well as a fiction writer. (Yes, Robert E. Howard wrote poetry, some of the best I’ve ever read.) Unlike Howard, Smith’s fiction has a complexity to it Howard’s lacked, especially in word choice. Isaac Asimov went on record complaining that he didn’t like reading Smith because he had to keep looking words up in the dictionary. (You see, kids, in the dark days before computers we had these things called dictionaries and when you didn’t know a word, you went to the dictionary and…ah, never mind.) And if Asimov had to look it up, then you know it probably wasn’t on the tip of everyone’s tongue.
In spite of the work involved at times, Smith is still very much a writer worth reading. I’ll be tackling at least one of his collections later this year for the posts I’m doing at Black Gate on the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. There were four now highly collectible volumes of Smith’s work published as part of the BAF series. In fact the very first BAF book I ever owned was Smith’s Hyperborea. I’ve only dipped into Smith’s works a little, but he was a writer of wild imagination. We could use more like him today.
My reading plans for the evening have just been changed.
If you’re jealous, you can do something about that here. My copy was 168 of 200. I don’t know if the Foundation is shipping high number or low numbers first.
But like I said, my reading plans have just changed.
The Robert E. Howard Foundation announced last week that their next book, Swords of the North, is available for preorder. I’ve ordered my copy. Is that not a great cover? The book ships in December, so it would make an excellent Christmas gift for the REH fan in your life, even if that fan is yourself. Maybe especially if that fan is yourself.
Here’s what the announcement, lifted from the REH Foundation page:
There is a clear self-consistency among all of Howard’s tales which will readily demonstrate that underlying it all is a coherent vision of a fictional history of the world and mankind, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s term a “secondary” world, internally consistent, full of strangeness and wonder, “free from the domination of observed fact,” yet quite credible, a world rooted in the familiar if populated with the unfamiliar, a world that combines the ordinary with the extraordinary. Just as Tolkien’s “Arda” is our Earth, so too is Howard’s world.
-from Rusty Burke’s introduction
The REH Foundation Press is proud to present Swords of the North, a collection of Robert E. Howard’s Celtic/Viking adventure stories. The book checks in at 540 pages, and will be printed in hardback with dust jacket, in a limited first-print quantity of 200 copies, each individually numbered. Cover art by Aaron Miller and introduction by Rusty Burke. This volume marks the first publication of the fragment that begins with, “Between berserk battle rages,” which features Cormac Mac Art’s partner, Wulfhere Skull-splitter. It also collects for the first time in one volume all of the James Allison stories and fragments, both incomplete drafts of “The Temple of Abomination,” and other rarities. The book is expected to ship in December 2014. Pre-order yours today.
Swords of the North is $45 for REHF Members, $50 for non-members (all prices in US dollars) plus shipping. (How to become a member? Look here.)
Shipping prices and additional details (such as the contents) can be found at the REH Foundation website.
The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard
Del Rey
trade paper $18.00
ebook Kindle $11.59 Nook $13.99
I read this story for the first time recently in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy collection The Spawn of Cthulhu. (The subject of my next BAF post for Black Gate.) Just from the title, I could have sworn I’d read it before, but I think I would have remembered this one.
“The Children of the Night” was first published in Weird Tales in the April-May issue of 1931. It’s an interesting little story in that it ties two of Howard’s series characters in with H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Continue reading