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

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

And he relied on coincidence to a degree that would've made Charles Dickens blush. But I still love him.

It's not a bad way to dip into Burroughs, TBH -- a lot of his plotting is fairly similar, so check out the different series and see which is most appealing in terms of setting, etc., and keep going there.

Barsoom has always been my one true love.

Yeah, Burroughs used that plot with almost mechanical regularity.

As I think about it, for lost civilization/lost continent Burroughs stuff, there's more to be found in some of the mid-to-late period Tarzans or some of the post-Warlord Barsoom books -- Thuvia, Maid of Mars and The Chessmen of Mars are the ones that spring to mind. Pellucidar is lost world more in the savage wilderness sense.

Richard wrote: "I remember enjoying this trilogy"

Yeah, I read it several times when I was young. I also liked her Indigo series. She did also write two other Time Master-related trilogies -- a sequel trilogy and a prequel trilogy -- but they didn't do as much for me.

Started Louise Cooper's The Initiate for probably the first time in 25 years. She was taken from us entirely too soon and is sadly obscure these days, at least in the US.

And finished Krull (it was short), and it was kind of the platonic ideal of an Alan Dean Foster 1980s film novelization -- not necessarily expanding on the source material, but retelling it (with a photo insert).

And I just started reading the novelization of Krull by, inevitably, Alan Dean Foster. (Truth be told, when I originally suggested this as a groupread theme some years back, it was at least partially to give myself an excuse to read this book.)

Yeah, there's always been at least an undercurrent of humor in Smith, and I think the Hyperborea stories are where it's most likely to surface. "The Seven Geases" is another Hyperborean story where it comes to the forefront.

Finished Shadowfire and started the third in the trilogy, Hunting the White Witch. Which was originally called Quest for the White Witch, and I have no idea why it was retitled -- I can KIND OF see the logic of switching "Vazkor, Son of Vazkor" to "Shadowfire" on the second book, but this one just seems so … minor.

I actually watched CtB last night myself. Which means that tonight will probably be Destroyer.

Also, thumbs up to the original silent film adaptation, which had some great stop-motion animation.

By the end of the Tarzan series it had gotten to the point where you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a lost Roman colony, or the descendants of some Crusaders who should've turned left at Albuquerque or something.

I need to read those Opar books, including the new one (ones?).

Some of Burroughs' Tarzan books (most obviously Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, but I think it first appeared in The Return of Tarzan) also had Tarzan visiting the ruined city of Opar somewhere in the middle of the African jungle, a lost outpost of now-sunken Atlantis.

Mary wrote: "He doesn't get better.

Though circumstances jogged my memory about the third book. 0:)"

I wasn't expecting him to, TBH. :)

I read the entire trilogy, but it was on the order of 20 years ago, so my recollections of books 2 & 3 are … fuzzy at best. Interesting about the plague.

So far, the narrator is pretty unsympathetic, with that kind of casual 1970s attitude towards sexual violence.

Now I have (in addition to various other things) the complete Night Shade collected fiction, and the complete Hippocampus Press collected poetry.

The first time I encountered him was yet another public library SF paperback spinner:



At some point after that, I found used copies of and at the local second-hand book store -- somebody in my hometown must've disposed of a bunch of Ballantine Adult Fantasy titles there, and I was picking them up by sight even before I knew they were actually a thing. Then I got (love that J.K. Potter artwork!) and that gave me a deeper dive into his work.

And, having finished Poseidonis, I decided to go back and finish up Tanith Lee's Birthgrave trilogy, so started Shadowfire, the second book.

(Although I much prefer its original title, Vazkor, Son of Vazkor.)

(And here's a link to an Eldritch Dark page that lists the contents of the book; and all of the stories are available to read on their site.

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/...

Actually, CAS is one of my top half-dozen favorite authors (although all other things being equal, I do prefer the more fantasy/imaginary world stories (Zothique, Hyperborea, etc.) to the more conventional contemporary horror).

Poseidonis was a fine collection, although the Poseidonis stories proper were only about 25% of the book (he only wrote five of them). I'd say The Death of Malygris was probably the best story of the lot.

Lin Carter rounded out the book with an assortment of other, mostly similarly-themed stories and poems -- one or two stories about Lemuria, one or two set in ancient Greece, etc.