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

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

Excellent! I was thinking it might be time to revisit Barsoom; and more Dunsany is always a good thing ...

Jason M wrote: "So got a little news for y'all: I and 2 of my mates can now proudly strut the annals of time as once members of The Black Company. That's right - we are listed among the deceased members tombstones..."

Congrats! I'll raise a glass to your memory at the earliest possible opportunity ...

Also maybe Thomas Harlan's Oath of Empire series (four books beginning with The Shadow of Ararat), which take place in an alternate history 8th Century or so in which Rome never fell, and also magic works. Plenty of large-scale armies and battle magic.

Or for straight historical fiction, I'm currently reading Nicholas Guild's The Assyrian (and sequel The Blood Star), set in, yes, the Assyrian empire shortly after Sargon's time.

Next up: The Assyrian by Nicholas Guild -- not technically sword & sorcery, of course, but one of those great, bloody Technicolor historical epics from the 1980s that may be of interest to sword & sorcery readers.

Yes, I can totally see the Bewitched comparison as well.

It's horror time -- I picked up Dark Forces: New Stories of Suspense and Supernatural Horror (the anthology where Stephen King's "The Mist" was first published) for the first time in probably 30+ years. Such a great set of authors, including but not limited to Karl Edward Wagner and Manly Wade Wellman (who I did not realize was apparently still writing new fiction until well into his eighties, and well into the Eighties).

And now for something completely different: The Iron Devils, brand new from Ari Marmell. So far (less than one chapter in) it seems like a sort of post-apocalyptic/humans vs. machines sort of set-up, but I'll be curious to see where it goes.

I really liked his Widdershins books when I read them a few years back.

And for myself, I just finished Chronicles of the Black Company and was reminded of just how much I like these books (and how occasionally weird they get).

For me, I've been reading fantasy & SF pretty much for as long as I've been reading. I'm pretty sure Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books were some of the earliest on the fantasy side; ditto C.S. Lewis' Narnia books.

The main event, though, was 1977 -- not only was I sitting in the theater seeing the original Star Wars for the first time, but the Rankin-Bass Hobbit animated movie was on broadcast TV and I started reading Tolkien about as soon as the closing credits on the movie were finished.

The other important moment was probably a couple years later when Dad gave me a copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars -- I know I'd read Tarzan books already, but Barsoom was a whole new world.

I basically spent all of junior high and high school reading my way through the SF section at the public library (and the school library -- the high school library had a copy of Michael Moorcock's The Eternal Champion).

Also of crucial importance: Getting into D&D at around the same time. I never actually played all that much, but I got just as much enjoyment from reading the various books & modules as I did from reading fiction; and there was also Appendix N in the original Dungeon Masters Guide, and, more importantly, all of the book reviews in Dragon Magazine in the mid-1980s, which steered me to a lot of stuff I might otherwise have missed.

Oh, and apparently somebody in my hometown had an assortment of Ballantine Adult Fantasy paperbacks which they sold to the local used book store -- that's where I got copies of Hyperborea and Poseidonis and a bunch of William Morris novels (although those took me longer to appreciate).

Oddly, I didn't really start reading Robert E. Howard until I was in college -- the Conan comics never really called to me, but the public library in the town where I went to college had a copy of Conan, and when I actually read the stories (even with the de Camp & Carter additions), I knew I needed more.

S.E. wrote: "I'm about 12% though Port of Shadows.

Prior this, I've only read The Black Company (i.e., #1 f the series), so reading this #1.5 episode makes sense for me.

Port of ..."

I'll be very interested to hear what you think when you finish the book; and especially interested to hear your thoughts if you do proceed further in the series.

And I finished Port of Shadows and moved on to Shadows Linger and (as I said in my review), while I liked it, I would not recommend that a first-time reader read it in chronological sequence -- I think it spoils too many reveals from later in the initial trilogy.

Conversely, if you read the original books years ago, you probably don't have to reread them before picking up this one -- it's a very self-contained story.

Yep, I'm all caught up now. The "Misericorde" episode was interesting -- I didn't realize it had actually been published in a tabletop RPG magazine initially.

My favorite is actually the spin-off Empire trilogy (Mistress of the Empire et al.) by Feist & Janny Wurts.

A good place to stop (at least temporarily) would be at the end of The White Rose (book 3) -- that's the end of the original trilogy. The story that begins with book 4 (and continues to the end of book 10) is its own thing.

Yeah, there's a fair amount of telling rather than showing -- I think that's a function of the conceit that Croaker is recording everything in the company's Annals -- but I think that in this case it works, since everything is being filtered through Croaker's voice.

Jordan wrote: "Loved reading your posts. After working through the series any stand out as a favorite?"

For short stories, I've always had a soft spot for "Misericorde", although my list would also include "Reflections for the Winter of My Soul" and pretty much everything in Night Winds.

For the novels, if I had to pick one, I'd probably say Bloodstone even though it was his first, and I think his technique had improved for Darkness Weaves and Dark Crusade.

Hmmm … might be a shorter list if I mentioned the ones that weren't favorites …

(On a mostly unrelated note, after listening to the "Undertow" episode of the podcast, one of my favorite "resurrection gone wrong" stories is "Where There's a Will" by Richard Matheson and Richard Christian Matheson, which I first encountered in Kirby McCauley's Dark Forces: New Stories of Suspense and Supernatural Horror, the same place I read my first KEW story.)

Jordan wrote: "He co-wrote Killer with David Drake. There is some debate about who wrote what though.

He also wrote erotica and had one published novel The Other Women under the name Kent Allard (from Sticks!). That novel is super rare, I've never seen anyone willing to sell it. "

That's right -- I have a copy of Killer somewhere but I haven't gotten around to it yet. The Kent Allard thing is news to me, though. (And Allard also gets mentioned in the modern-day Kane story "At First Just Ghostly", although I don't remember if he actually appeared onstage.)

OK, finished The Black Company last night, so switched from the omnibus to Port of Shadows. I'm enjoying it so far -- the voice is still very much there. A couple of early comments: First, there are occasional sections set back during the time of the initial White Rose war (before the Lady & the Dominator were defeated for the first time). Not sure how those bits fit into the notion that these are annals written by Croaker & others; maybe there'll be an explanatory note later?

Second, although this fits chronologically between The Black Company and Shadows Linger, I'm not sure yet if a first-time reader would want to read it at that point in the sequence -- I'm wondering if it might prematurely give away some reveals from Shadows Linger or The White Rose. (Not a problem for me, obviously.) But as I said, I'm enjoying it.

(Oh, and on a tangentially-related note, this also inspired me to dig out my copy of Mythic Vistas: The Black Company Campaign Setting, just so that I could see the map and read some of the setting entries.)

Oh, and now that I've finished rereading the books, I started listening to the podcast and am quite enjoying it.

Jack wrote: "[First off, for Joseph: Fellow Minnesotan here. I walked by the downtown Minneapolis Shinders (at 8th and Hennepin) on the way to work every day for a few years. I never made it in there, and now it's too late because Shinders is gone and I don't work in Mpls anymore.]"

[waves from window]

The store I worked at was the one in Bloomington -- it was opening just about the same time I moved there, which worked out exceedingly well for me.

I did stop in the downtown store on a relatively regular basis -- it had a larger book section than the suburban stores, and also got a lot of imported & small-press magazines that never made it out to the suburbs -- Cemetery Dance, Interzone, etc., etc.

OK, started Chronicles of the Black Company and will take a break at the appropriate time to insert Port of Shadows.

Since I did it for Kane, I'll do it here as well: My history with Glen Cook.

The time: The summer of 1990. I had recently graduated from college, moved to the Twin Cities and gotten an apartment with a friend of mine, the logic being that we'd spend a bit of time living in the big city & working crappy, low-paying jobs while we figured out how to spend our lives. I ended up working at a store called Shinder's -- it was a small chain (about a dozen stores, all in the Twin Cities & suburbs) of book/magazine/comic/RPG/sportscard stores. (Although there's a non-zero chance that in those pre-internet days, the entire chain was being supported by sales of naughty magazines and adult videocassettes. But anyway.) Because of my personal inclinations, I was more-or-less in charge of the paperbacks (especially the SF section), games and comics. I don't know what drew me to them, but I remember we had all six currently-extant Black Company books (The Black Company through Dreams of Steel) on the shelf, so one day I picked up The Black Company, started reading it, and bought and plowed through the entire series in a week or two. Then reached the end of Dreams of Steel, where it said, "To be continued in Glittering Stone". The first book of which would not be released for another six years. So, yeah, this whole "Why haven't they published the next book in this series?!?!?" thing? Not new.

(Actually, so far Glen Cook holds the record for longest wait between installments, at least of things I've read -- there was close to a 25 year gap between the last couple books of the Dread Empire series, although there were extenuating circumstances. And that record might get blown out of the water now that Diane Duane is apparently back to work on The Door Into Starlight.)

I've read much of Cook's other work over the years -- the Dread Empire, a bunch of the Garrett, P.I. books, several of his standalones -- but the Black Company has always been my first love.