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

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

I don't mind weird names so much as bad names. Which I admit is a bit subjective … Some authors (Clark Ashton Smith or Jack Vance, for example) have the ability to coin really, really good-sounding fake names -- Zothique, Avoosl Wuthoqquan, Ghyl Tarvok, Araminta, etc.

Other authors (M.A.R. Barker is my go-to example) have names that are weird but are linguistically appropriate to their settings, so I'm willing to deal with them.

Others (and unfortunately Robert E. Howard very much falls into this camp) just … aren't very good at it. Most of Howard's more acceptable names are lifted wholesale from historical settings, or are possibly slightly mangled. When he made up his own names, well … there were entirely too many that were Thog, Thaug, Thrak, Thurg, etc., etc.

(Which isn't, of course, to say that the rest of the fiction wasn't good enough to warrant pushing past the names.)

Finished House of Cthulhu and moved on to Tarra Khash: Hrossak!: Tales of the Primal Land, also sword & sorcery by Brian Lumley.

(And my current dwelling place is on the third floor, so if it's ever flooded I'll have bigger things to worry about than just my poor, poor books …)

Thanks! That's awfully tempting ...

I never rightly knew -- it happened while I was off at grad school, so I wasn't around for the clean-up.?

Technically, it wasn't the creek out back that got us -- the sump pump failed and we got a foot or two of water in the basement. In my case, it took out the lowest couple shelves in all my bookcases, plus many boxes of comic books and quite a bit of RPG stuff.

The biggest loss, undoubtedly, was the The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide omnibus that I'd actually had signed by Douglas Adams, then had sent home as part of a swap (I didn't have enough room in the place I was living for all of my stuff, so periodically when I went back home, I'd box up all of the books I'd read and switch them out for others.)

Could've been worse, though.

Like I said, at least the first couple of stories in House of Cthulhu (which don't include any of the Tarra Kash stuff) give me a bit of a Clark Ashton Smith vibe. Not as good as Smith, of course, but …

It's a bit of a bummer -- back in the day, I had the W. Paul Ganley editions of the first few Dreams books.







which at least had some nice art. Fabian, I believe?

But then they were lost in the flood in the summer of 1993, just by virtue of the fact that they were on one of the lower shelves in my basement room.

Late to the post, but I started House of Cthulhu, the first of Brian Lumley's Primal Lands collections.

Interestingly, the vibe I'm getting, at least from the first couple stories, is very distinctly Clark Ashton Smith -- kind of midway between the Hyperborea and Zothique stories.

Better late than never: I just started House of Cthulhu.

Not sword & sorcery, but I just started Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth.

For me, I came to the books after playing the games, so I already kind of knew who Ciri was, so she didn't bother me as much in the books. But it was still odd, given that Geralt is ostensibly the main character.

(Having said which, I did enjoy the series.)

Yeah, that was the thing that surprised me most about the series -- Geralt didn't get nearly as much screen time as you'd expect, and in several of the books he wasn't even really the focus.

S.E. wrote: "Not &SS, but I am reading Todd McAulty's The Robots of Gotham.... and Todd McAulty is a penname for John O'Neill, S&S supporter and leader of BlackGate.com. It's h..."

Nice! I shall have to investigate ...

One more thing: Apparently, there are two different listings for the book up on Amazon, one that shows the sale price and one that shows like $8.00 (which still doesn't seem unreasonable, TBH).

Here's the link to the cheap version (n.b. this might just be a 24 hour sale):

https://www.amazon.com/Sword-Sorcery-...

The Sword & Sorcery Anthology, edited by David G. Hartwell, is currently $1.99 on Amazon.

If you've read a lot of S&S, especially classic stuff, you'll probably recognize a fair bit of what's included here, but it's a pretty first-rate assortment of stories for one low, low price.

I'm back to fantasy with The Red-Stained Wings, second in Elizabeth Bear's Lotus Kingdoms trilogy and fifth novel set in the Eternal Sky world. I love these books! They tend more epic than S&S, I suppose, but are set in a fascinating world loosely based on central & east Asia -- think steppe-riding nomads and large, unwieldy bureaucratic empires, plus magic.

Not that I want to poo-poo the new books, but god, what do we need to do to convince ERB, Inc., to actually get all of Burroughs' original books back into print in clean, authorized editions?

Have we done a Lin Carter read? Lots of great anthologies and, well, less great but still pretty fun original novels to choose from.

Starting The World's Desire by H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang, in which they wrote a sequel to The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Finished The Scholars of Night (which was great, and it's a darned shame that John M. Ford's books will likely never be reprinted) and started The Devil in a Forest by Gene Wolfe, which is at least sword & sorcery-adjacent, as I recall.