Joseph’s Comments (group member since Oct 24, 2012)

Joseph’s comments from the Sword & Sorcery: "An earthier sort of fantasy" group.

Jack wrote: "If you have a spare $200, you can purchase a really nice deluxe manuscript edition of A Princess of Mars:

https://www.erbbooks.com/store/p84/st..."

That actually tempts me more than I care to admit ...

Finished Doorways in the Sand (it was short and fast) and started Byzantium, a massive historical novel by Michael Ennis. This one will take a while.

... is this the point when I should mention that Gods of Mars ends on a major cliffhanger which is resolved in Warlord of Mars? (And Princess/Gods/Warlord is essentially John Carter's great tale, even though he does features in the subsequent books to one degree or another, including at least one from his POV.)

Christian wrote: "Finished The Gods of Mars yesterday and absolutely loved it, it was a blast to read. I liked it better than A Princess of Mars. Man, ERB is quickly climbing the ladder of favourite ..."

Gods of Mars might be my favorite thing he ever wrote.

And for something completely different, I'm starting Roger Zelazny's Doorways in the Sand, which just got rereleased as an eBook.

I remember getting this in hardcover from the public library many, many years ago, but am not sure if I've read it since high school.

Oh, yeah, I've already donated to the Hugo's GoFundMe and also bought a t-shirt, and am keeping my fingers very firmly crossed.

I've lived within a couple of miles of the store for almost all of my adult life, and they're the primary reason all of my walls are overflowing bookshelves, although I admit I hadn't been going there as frequently in recent years due to my shift to Kindle reading and also my lack of space for any more stuff in here.

I'm 99% certain my first encounter with Wagner was his story "Where the Summer Ends", his contribution to Kirby McCauley's (magnificent) anthology Dark Forces: New Stories of Suspense and Supernatural Horror.

I know I'd heard of Kane -- Wagner had an entry in Baird Searles' A Reader's Guide to Fantasy, which I got from the public library when I was young -- but I didn't lay hands on the actual books until years later when I lucked into them at Uncle Hugo's of blessed memory.

(For the record, the early 90s was a great time to be going to Uncle Hugo's because I could generally come of of there with an entire grocery bag full of used Jack Vance or Lin Carter paperbacks, plus whatever other treasures I found on the shelves.)

Conan: The Road of Kings, his Conan pastiche, is also available on Kindle. I wish they'd release eBook versions of his horror story collections and Bran Mak Morn: Legion From The Shadows, his Bran Mak Morn book.

When I did a Kane reread last year, I mostly relied on the Kindle versions and I don't recall anything particularly egregious about them, although maybe I've just gotten numbed to it over the years. The one thing about the Kindle versions is they just cover the original five paperbacks and the hardcover Book of Kane, so they're missing the novel fragment and the last few stories he wrote in the 80s & 90s, the ones that mostly had Kane running around in modern times (including the Elric crossover story).

(As an aside, when I first got my Kindle I would very carefully highlight every typo that I came across, but I could never figure out where to actually send them, so I eventually gave up on the habit.)

Charles wrote: "JIf you know Morgan Holmes, a REHupan who is on facebook, he's done quite a bit of work on parsing out who wrote that last section. I originally thought it was probably Otis Adelebert Kline but Morgan argues that it wasn't. That's probably where to go for some thoughts on the matter..."

Yeah, I'm familiar with Morgan but hadn't remembered he'd done work on Almuric (although there's an excellent chance that his was the essay that I'd read and then forgotten the source of). Thanks!

Decided to revisit some old-school urban fantasy, so started Jack, the Giant Killer by Charles de Lint.

And finished Almuric (although I still have another 100 pages or so in the collection -- Almuric proper is either a longish novella or a very short novel) and I enjoyed it, but (and this isn't an original observation) it almost reads like a parody at times -- like Howard was taking the piss both out of Burroughs-style planetary romance and his own Conan stories. Esau Cairn is so ridiculously muscle-bound, and comments on it so frequently, that it occasionally verges on being silly. Still, I'm glad I finally read it.

(Also, I know there's some question about who actually wrote the end of the story, and where Howard's writing ended, but that wasn't addressed anywhere in the book.)

I still want them to put out authorized eBook editions of everything. I mean, it's not like the public domain ones aren't already thick on the ground, and this way we could get something with a bit of quality control. But in the meantime, I'll be happy with the hardcovers.

(I do have them all in paperback, but it's a mixed assortment of different Ballantine printings and a few from Ace.)

Did I mention that ERB, Inc., is doing new hardcovers of Tarzan (and, one hopes, eventually all of Burroughs' stuff, although at the rate they're going it'll be a while)?

Here's the preorder page for the second series of Tarzan books, nos. 5-8.

https://edgarriceburroughs.com/store/...

After careful consideration, I started Robert E. Howard's Adventures in Science Fantasy since it contains Almuric, his take on a Barsoom-like that I've never read before.

For me it was a copy of A Princess of Mars with the D'Achille cover art that Dad picked up at the bookstore and gave to me. (I don't think he'd ever read Burroughs, but his Heinlein paperbacks were a staple of my childhood; and I'd already been reading such Tarzan paperbacks as I could get at the library.)



It's just as well that they hadn't transitioned to the Whelan covers -- I have serious doubts as to whether he would've bought it for me if the cover looked like this:



(Which isn't to say I don't love that art; and now I have full sets of both D'Achille and Whelan editions.)

OK, I'm a few days late, but one more I'm adding to the mix: The Lemurian Stone by Stephen F. Hickman. I very vaguely remember picking this up at some point in the late 80s/early 90s, and I think I read it, but couldn't say for certain. And the copy I bought originally (quite possibly at a Waldenbooks) is long gone, so I had to go to the secondary marketplace on Amazon to replace it.

I reread Burroughs last year, and I just read a whole bunch of Brackett in May & June, so maybe it's time to finally crack into Almuric. And/or there's that new collection of Poul Anderson's sword & planet from DMR Books ...

Finished NADA the Lily and decided to keep on with Haggard, so started another historical, Montezuma's Daughter, set in the waning days of the Aztec Empire.

S.E. wrote: "Is Haggard's bday common knowledge? Why would you know that? lol."

It's not a big secret or anything, but I only learned it by coincidence from a couple of different blog posts I saw after I had started the book. (Which looks to be a good one -- I think it's going to be more of a straight historical adventure, but it's about Chaka (Shaka), the Zulu leader.)