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

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

Anthony wrote: "Just finished The Cornelius Chronicles Vol III yesterday. Jerry C is an EC of sorts—a champion of satire, at least!"

I read the Cornelius Chronicles (at least the first volume) a few times many years ago and they were weird. But weird in a way that, for some reason, has always stuck with me.

I have Endangered Species although I think the last time I read it was sometime in the early 1990s, and I suspect that many of the stories went whooshing straight over my head.

My history with Gene Wolfe: The first story of his that I read was almost certainly "The Detective of Dreams" in Kirby McCauley's anthology Dark Forces: New Stories of Suspense and Supernatural Horror, although at the time I had no idea who he was; and (as mentioned above) the point of the story when whooshing straight over my head until I reread it just last fall.

My first serious encounter with Wolfe was when I was in college and, on a whim, I picked up The Shadow of the Torturer from the local public library (I'm assuming I'd heard about it somewhere or other, but this was the late 1980s, so details are … sketchy) and it blew the back of my skull right off of my head. I don't remember how many of the books were on the library shelf, but in fairly short order I owned my own copies of all five of the New Sun books; then came the Gene Wolfe issue of the Terminus revival of Weird Tales (which I would have purchased after the fact as a back issue; I really do love that incarnation of the magazine), which led to me picking up most every book I could find with his name on the spine, even if I didn't always grasp the point, and none of them ever connected with me in quite the same way as the Torturer books.

I've always been impressed by his ability to tell a story in what he doesn't put on the page.

I've been thinking for a while that it was time to revisit Corum ...

No sorcery (I think) but plenty of swords (well, sabers for the most part) in Swords of the Steppes: The Complete Cossack Adventures, Volume Four by Harold Lamb.

Finally getting back into fantasy with Empire of Sand by Tasha Suri.

Cindy wrote: "A worthy task- he wrote a lot, and they are not easy to find anymore.
I was thrilled to find a copy of The Ingoldsby Legends, mentioned as Allans goto reading, and also on the shelf of RE Howard. ..."

Well, to be fair, I'm cheating -- I picked up a Collected Works on my Kindle for a couple of bucks. Before that, I had been stocking up on the Wildside Press reprints. The oldest Haggard book I own is a copy of The Witch's Head that I'm guessing dates back to the turn of the (20th) century, if not before.

I should track down Ingoldsby Legends myself.

Allan and the Holy Flower is one I've not read yet, but that reminds me that I'm overdue on my Read Every Rider Haggard Novel project.

Cindy wrote: "I have the 1963 MacDonald illustrated, with a water colour slip jacket by Hookway Cowles. Illustrations by Lancelot Speed. Cowles also does the title illustration of a viking standing on a longboat..."

That's a nice one! Haven't ever seen that before.

S.E. wrote: "The ISDB has a listing of all the editions
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cg...


I ordered one from Amazon, the 1978 Zebra edition, which has the illustrations:

[bookcover:Eric Brighteyes..."

Nice! I have a copy of that edition, but didn't realize it had the illustrations. And the fact that it appears to be a photostat of the original printing (as opposed to Zebra doing their own typesetting) means it'll probably have VASTLY fewer typos ...

One of my all-time favorites, arguably the best writer out there, and it's been entirely too long since I read any of his work.

I'm into Chanur's Legacy, which will be the end of my current C.J. Cherryh reread. After that, it'll probably be Empire of Sand by Tasha Suri.

I'm still reading C.J. Cherryh, but I've progressed to The Pride of Chanur, which is fun, fast-paced space opera, as opposed to some of the other, more recent books I've been reading, which are all about the inner workings of complex bureaucracies.

Just checking in to say that I'm still firmly ensconced in C.J. Cherryh's Alliance/Union space opera books, but I will be getting back to the swords and the sorcery sooner or later ...

One of the entirely too many podcasts I subscribe to is Imaginary Worlds. As you'd expect from the title, it's mostly about fantasy & SF topics -- recent episodes have covered cosplay, D&D, conlangs, etc. Episodes are typically about 30 minutes long and I get a bit of an NPR vibe from the host.

I'm mentioning it here because his last two episodes have been about REH and about Margaret Brundage respectively. Both had some interesting discussion, although I had quibbles with some portions of the REH episode (I'd need to revisit the episode to come up with specific examples, though). The info in the Brundage episode was almost entirely new to me.

The Cyrion stories are interesting because as I recall (it's been some years since I read the book) most or all of them are actually puzzle stories -- Cyrion is cursed, for example, and has to create a loophole out of the specific language, or find a way to turn the curse back on the sender.

Jason M wrote: "I've finally actually completed a group read within the group reading period!! :)

The Barbarian Swordsmen perhaps the best Heroic Fantasy anthology I've read. Absolutely delightful."

Wow, that is a pretty great ToC.

S.E. wrote: "Joseph/all, what are your thoughts on Quatermain?"

My first introduction to Haggard was … well, actually it was an excerpt from She: A History of Adventure (which may be his best novel) in Lin Carter's Realms Of Wizardry, but that sent me to the H shelf in the library's fiction section, where I found a Haggard omnibus that in addition to She included King Solomon's Mines and Allan Quatermain, and I don't think you could ask for a better introduction to Haggard, nor a better collection of adventure novels, and I'd highly recommend all three.

[n.b. She is not an Allan Quatermain novel, although Haggard later wrote a sequel that brought Ayesha and Quatermain together.)

Caveats: They're very much products of their time in terms of Haggard's attitude; but (unlike ERB) he had actually lived in Africa, so he knew what he was talking about and his portrayal of the natives is probably as respectful as you're likely to get under the circumstances. In some ways, the hardest part to process with modern sensibilities is this: Quatermain is first & foremost a big-game hunter, so pretty much all of the novels, before they get to the lost-race stuff, will include several chapters in which Quatermain and his companions laying unholy waste to all manner of elephants and water buffalo and springboks and what have you.

I'm a big fan of Haggard -- I actually read Eric Brighteyes a couple of years back for a Viking-themed group read. I've been trying to go back and read all of his stuff -- he was surprisingly prolific, although at least in the early years he was writing a lot of contemporary (Victorian) fiction without any overt fantastical elements. Maybe this will be a good excuse to move on to the next novel of his on my list.

I'm still mostly off in space opera land -- almost done with Downbelow Station -- but I also picked up the first King Conan collection (The Chronicles of King Conan, Volume 1: The Witch of the Mists) and the The Chronicles of Kull, Vol. 1: A King Comes Riding and Other Stories.

Jack wrote: "Reading John Brunner's The Traveler in Black.

As a purely trivial aside, I've always spelled -el verbs with two 'L's, e.g. traveller. According to this graph, American English shif..."

I tend to spell it with two Ls because of

from my misspent youth.