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

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

Finished Beren and Lúthien and decided to push on to The Fall of Gondolin -- not like I'll be pressed for time or anything.

On to Beren and Lúthien, which is … interesting. It has all of JRRT's different versions of the story, going back to the original 1917 manuscript, and in that one (which is what I'm reading now) the story is pretty familiar, but the tone is very, very different -- almost Dunsanian.

OK, I finished Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth and started The Children of Húrin, which isn't S&S per se, but which at least has a lot of Elder Eddas and Icelandic Sagas in its DNA

Clint wrote: "Gotrek & Felix: The First Omnibus with its focus on skaven comes to mind."

Yeah, the Old World is riddled with disease, rat-men and Chaos-spawn.

And since it's been seven years, under the circumstances this seems like as good a time as any for a Tolkien reread. I'm beginning with The Silmarillion and will probably add in at least some of the books (Beren and Lúthien, e.g.) that were published since 2013.

I was incredibly disappointed when the Scorpion King movie pretty much abandoned all of the Egyptian stuff from Mummy Returns to become just a bog-standard generic sword & sorcery film.

It was a tough decision, but in the end the ancient Egyptian setting was what sold me.

Getting a head start with Men of Bronze, which is bodes to be a cracking good read.

Production error in the typesetting. It looks like the line about the plowhorse got swapped with the line "the hilt in place with a loud, satisfying smack of the guard" just before the first paragraph break on the top of page 217.

Finished The Last Hieroglyph and started L. Sprague de Camp's Lost Continents, which is non-fiction but it's mostly about Atlantis, where an awful lot of S&S fiction has taken place.

This was my first Smith -- how could I resist that cover on the library SF spinner rack? And it had a very good selection of stories, including some Zothique

Smith has been one of my favorite authors for, well, a very long time now.

Realms Of Wizardry is finished, and it really was a very strong collection of early-to-mid-20th Century fantasy.

And I'm continuing on the short story path with The Last Hieroglyph, vol. 5 of the complete short stories of Clark Ashton Smith. (I started it because I wanted something going when I took my Kindle along with me, while I was reading the Carter anthologies at home; and I kind of screwed up because I should've been reading A Vintage From Atlantis, #3 in the series, but I jumped ahead to #5 by mistake. Ah, well.)

And now I'm into Realms Of Wizardry. If I had to pick just one of the two anthologies, it would probably be Realms because I think it has a very slightly stronger selection of stories & excerpts; also, it was my first introduction to H. Rider Haggard.

Yeah, we're nothing if not flexible.

It was one of a pair he did for Doubleday in 1976 -- the other being Realms Of Wizardry, which I also plan to read. They're not sword & sorcery anthologies per se, although they certainly include S&S stories. They're mostly kind of a spiritual successor to some of his earlier Ballantine Adult Fantasy anthologies, with a mix of older (Voltaire) and more recent (Fritz Leiber) authors, and a mix of short stories and novel excerpts. They were my first introduction (even if I didn't realize it at the time) to a number of great authors, including (from this book) William Morris and E.R. Eddison.

Starting up Kingdoms of Sorcery.

I created a separate thread elsewhere, but speaking of magazines and anthologies, Weird Tales is back! There's a new issue Weird Tales #363(363) available either for Kindle

https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Tales-36...

or if you want a physical copy, your best bet is Darrell Schweitzer's eBay page (which I can vouch for -- I've ordered directly from him in the past, always with good results).

After a five year gap, there's a new issue of Weird Tales! (With another scheduled to follow in October, although I'm not going to hold my breath at this point.)

There's a digital version up on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Tales-36...

Otherwise, you can get physical copies from Darrell Schweitzer on his eBay page.

How convenient that this has dropped (or at least I've noticed it) in time for this year's anthology groupread ...

Richard wrote: "Didnt Lin Carter have an anthology about Lost Continents?"

Yep! The Magic of Atlantis