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

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

S.E. wrote: "Are you indicating ing your moniker should be “big foot”?"

Ha! No, myself, I was leaning in the direction of something more like Cugel or (deep cut here) Bramt Hex, as they're people who often don't quite realize just how far out of their depth they really are … :)

Thank you! I've really enjoyed my time in the group, and will try to live up to the big footsteps I'll be filling.

I finished Bran Mak Morn: The Last King and thought it was a solid collection of stories, the standouts being the obvious suspects of Kings of the Night and Worms of the Earth.

I know that Jan/Feb is anthology time, but after that, have we done "lost continents"? (Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, etc., which figured heavily in a lot of early S&S.)

Started Bran Mak Morn: The Last King for our Robert E. Howard group read.

Mary wrote: "The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern"

I'm really looking forward to that one -- I loved The Night Circus almost unreservedly.

I last read it in … must've been 2013 because that's when I wrote my review. So it's probably approaching time for a reread.

Yeah, the last time I read them (probably in the 90s), I kind of bogged down somewhere around Bili the Axe or shortly thereafter.

When first I read them, I started with Horseclans Odyssey because, per the review in Dragon Magazine, it was a prequel to the previously-published books.

They did all get rereleased as eBooks not too long ago, but the eBook covers are kind of horrific …



vs.



for example.

I'll watch it.

The only thing I'll say about Tros is that it's actually essentially one giant book, so you'd want to start from the beginning.

Tros was great!

I have fond memories of the Horseclans books from back in high school, but these day I'm a bit afraid to revisit them. Some great covers, though.

Clint wrote: "@Joseph, nice choices"

I'm enjoying them. First time I've read either in something close to 30 years. (And originally, I had Hellbound Heart in Night Visions: The Hellbound Heart. That was a good horror anthology series -- at least, the five or so that I had in paperback.)

Decided that it's October, so some scary books are in order: The Hellbound Heart and now The Damnation Game, both by Clive Barker.

And finished The Black Star, which if you have a couple of hours to kill is a perfectly fine standalone novel. (It was intended as the start of a trilogy, but I don't believe he ever wrote any of the projected sequels, and it comes to a reasonably satisfactory conclusion.)

Minnesota all my entire life (except for a couple of years in Madison, WI, for grad school).

And continuing on to Carter's The Black Star, after which it'll probably be time for something completely different.

Finished Lin Carter's Simrana Cycle and moved onto another Lin Carter -- Tower of the Medusa. Which is a 2011 reprint of a novella that formed half of an Ace Double and which has some really dire photoshopped cover art:



but I was greatly amused when I actually recognized the spaceship as an AMT Star Trek model kit I owned back when I was young.



It was cool because the model actually glowed in the dark!

(And my understanding is that it was an entirely unrelated generic spaceship model that AMT repurposed into their Star Trek line.)

I saw copies on Amazon that weren't too dear; and it looks like Wildside did a reprint not too long ago, although you'd lose the original cover art.



I remember reading it years ago and finding it to be one of his better full-length sword & sorcery novels. Of course, it was first in a projected trilogy? series? that never came to fruition.

Interestingly, I also see Wildside has done a couple reprints of Ballantine Adult Fantasy collections -- Discoveries in Fantasy and Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy, vol. 2 -- I'm guessing those were ones that contained nothing but public domain works?

And I finished all three books (the Tor editions) and yeah, Sorcery in Shad ends things on kind of a sour note -- not the fundamental story, which is serviceable, but the villains are a race of blacks and Lumley's treatment of them is … not great. Like, kind of aping Burroughs & Howard, which he should've known better than even in the 1970s, and given that this is supposed to be a lost, primordial continent he can't even pretend to be using historical antecedents or whatever.

I ended up starting Lin Carter's Simrana Cycle, which has I assume all of Carter's very Dunsanian Simrana stories, plus more recent stories by other authors in the same setting, and also a selection of stories by Dunsany himself. Carter's Dunsanian pastiche is actually pretty effective.

I might also try to work The Black Star into my schedule, but unfortunately it looks like it doesn't currently have an eBook edition, so I'd have to go back to my old paperback.