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

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

I liked the Dragon Age games and the Dragon Age novels, although I think that only the first two novels (The Stolen Throne and The Calling) would've worked really well for someone who hasn't played the games -- the first two were prequels set a generation or two back and showing how the world ended up in its current state, while later books were more closely tied to the ongoing narrative of the games.

I also still have to read the Mass Effect books one of these days.

Derek wrote: "S.E. wrote: "Funny. Sounds like we may hear about the rogue next group read. Have you already read them?"

I've read Sea of Death and wasn't impressed with that one either."

Yeah, I think your review of Sea of Death pretty much hits the nail on the head. I still think that was the best of his fiction that I've read, but "best" is a relative term in this case.

Greg wrote: "I think I have one or two of the Gord novels around somewhere but haven't read them yet - possibly because they're not in sequence (but maybe this isn't important in reading them?)."

No, they do have a story arc that progresses. Well, it's complicated ... There were the two original TSR books (Saga of Old City and its sequel Artifact of Evil). Then after Gygax was forced out of TSR and started New Infinities, he continued the series, but also went back and gave it a new beginning (and I'm not sure if he regarded the TSR books as actually "canonical"). In internal order the series was:
City of Hawks
Night Arrant (short story collection)
Sea of Death
Come Endless Darkness
Dance of Demons

Saga of Old City actually falls somewhere in the middle of City of Hawks, and Artifact of Evil precedes Sea of Death.

Now I'm tempted to go back and revisit them despite the fact that in many ways they're really not all that good ...

Derek wrote: "By some coincidence I have a set of his Gord the Rogue novels, and all have less than ten reviews..."

I read all of those -- the first two from TSR, and then the half dozen from New Infinities (the first of which kind of retconned the TSR books). Gygax' writing style was definitely a take it or leave it; my favorite was probably Sea of Death. In some of the later books Gord became the biggest Mary Sue I've ever read.

I finished Something About Eve; A Comedy Of Fig Leaves, which had a certain amount of sorcery, but, to the best of my recollection, not so much as a single sword, and started Court of Fives, which will be my first by Kate Elliott.

It's more interesting as a historical artifact than anything else at this point, I'd say.

(And it's been many, many years since I read it, but I kind of got the feeling that Norton was writing based on a second- or third-hand description of how the game was played.)

Love Hawkmoon.

I'm just about to start Something About Eve; A Comedy Of Fig Leaves, which isn't really sword & sorcery, but Lin Carter included it in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, so I think we have a "degrees of separation" thing going on.

Charles wrote: "He started so young. his writing definitely did change. His firsts books were set on Mars. He was about 17 or so, I think. They are readable but nothing as good as his work in his later twenties."

Agreed. Also, there was (no great surprise) an uptick in quality when he got to the point where he didn't have to write a 60,000 word novel in a single weekend.

And even more Moorcock, even more cheap! The Knight of the Swords (first in the Corum series) is $2.99.

http://www.amazon.com/Corum-Knight-Sw...

(Fair warning: These are quite short books -- when I first picked them up back in the 1980s, I got two collections -- The Swords Trilogy and The Chronicles of Corum -- which, between them had all six books and were still relatively slim mass-market paperbacks. But these might be my favorite Eternal Champion books.)

Elric: The Stealer of Souls is $4.99. This is the first in the six-volume Del Rey series that put everything in order of publication, so you're kind of starting in the middle of things; but I thought it was actually interesting to read them in that order and see how Moorcock's writing changed over time.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001...

And I finished Death's Heretic and am moving to something non-RPG-related: El Borak and Other Desert Adventures by Robert E. Howard -- one of Howard's characters with whom I have minimal acquaintance. I'm sure there'll be six-guns. Sorcery? Well, we'll see ...

S.E. wrote: "Just read and devoured the sword & sorcery, pulp short tale Mage Maze Demon, and am enjoying the graphic novels of Silent Hill Omnibus (since Silent Hills was cancell..."

Someday I need to play some of the Silent Hill games. I actually played most of the way through the original PS1 game (bought it for my PS3) but gave up when I found myself in an untenable situation -- low health, low ammo, nasty creatures on my tail, and at least an hour or two since my last save.

The first movie was actually pretty decent also.

Greg wrote: "One thing I liked about Games Workshop early on was that its still surviving magazine, White Dwarf, included articles for, and reviews of, a whole range of gaming stuff that catered to games published by TSR, Chaosium, FASA and other companies. There was also a lot of text and therefore a lot of information in those articles and scenarios."

That was what I loved about Dragon magazine back in the day (1980s into early 1990s) -- it wasn't just a TSR house organ; it had articles about and reviews of all sorts of other stuff from other publishers, although D&D was naturally the primary focus.

And it had a surprisingly strong fiction review section for many years -- Dragon book reviews turned me on to a lot of great authors back in the day, like C.J. Cherryh.

He's someone else I need to check out -- I love the Expanse books, and my Kindle edition of Leviathan Wakes had one of Abraham's fantasy novels (first in a series) bundled in with it.

Boiled in Lead is a band that's been playing here in the Twin Cities for 33+ years (although these days they just get together for a few shows per year). High-energy traditional and not-so-traditional music. They actually have multiple connections to fantasy literature -- they had a cameo in Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, and they wrote a soundtrack CD for Steven Brust's The Gypsy. And for several years back in the 90s and early 2000s, their singer was Adam Stemple, son of Jane Yolen and a fantasy author in his own right.

Here's one of their songs from their 2011 show -- I was somewhere in the audience at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJUN7...

Finished Master of Devils and started the next Pathfinder book, Death's Heretic by James L. Sutter, while sitting in the bar drinking beer and waiting to head over to the theater for Boiled in Lead's annual St. Patrick's Day show.

Greg wrote: "I'm inclined to read them that way too but are they mainly stand-alone novels?"

More a combination of standalone novels and short standalone series, much like Forgotten Realms -- Dave Gross, e.g., has written three? four? Pathfinder novels about the same set of characters, but I don't think there's much, if any, crossover from one author's books to another's.

I'm just reading them in order of publication because that seemed like an easy way to organize them -- otherwise, maybe check the titles, find ones that look interesting and just make sure to start with the first in that particular sequence. Or not -- I think even within series, the books are mostly written to be relatively standalone.

Dan wrote: "Very cool! I've never tried Pathfinder, though as a player of 3rd and 3.5 edition of D&D (skipped 4th, playing 5th now) it always intrigued me."

I have walls and piles and boxes of RPG supplements dating back to 1st edition AD&D, but haven't ever played all that much -- I just like reading the stuff and poring over the maps. I can't speak to Pathfinder as a ruleset, but the setting is fun and the four novels I've read have ranged from competent to really quite good.

Oh, also, I finished The Worldwound Gambit, which was quite good, and will be starting another Pathfinder novel, Master of Devils by Dave Gross.

(For no good reason, I find myself compelled to read the series in order of publication.)

And on a related note:

http://www.mybookishways.com/2016/03/...

I'm looking forward to it -- Numenera is an interesting setting; I backed the computer game on Kickstarter and will be playing it, well, once it's actually completed and released.