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

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

Yeah, old-school D&D is definitely much more S&S than epic fantasy -- Gygax as much as admitted that he just added the Tolkien races to capitalize on the LotR craze back in the day.

(I do think the really clever thing Gygax did was lifting the concept of the adventuring party -- a group of people with different skills/roles -- from Tolkien and grafting it onto S&S. It's interesting to think how things might have developed if he hadn't also brought in Elves, Dwarves, Orcs and HobbitsHalflings.)

The most recent author was Lin Carter -- they chose Warrior of World's End which series, I think, was specifically called out by name. Ironically, it's gotten some of the more positive reaction they've given.

Indeed some of their specific choices have been ... questionable. And I'm often torn between, "Hmmm ... Interesting point," and "You kids get off of my lawn!"

Yep, I've been following the series (and I recently checked and found that I'd read almost all of the authors Gygax mentioned). They've treated some of the authors rather harshly, but it's interesting reading nonetheless.

Schweitzer is an underappreciated master. Mask of the Sorcerer is my favorite (although could Wildside have picked a worse cover?) but I've enjoyed everything of his that I've read.

And he was also involved in the Terminus revival of Weird Tales back in the late 1980s, which was, to my mind, the high point of the current revival.

Looks like I'll be choosing Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time by Darrell Schweitzer, although I think it'll be closer to Clark Ashton Smith-style weird fantasy. First, though, I'm going to reread The Shattered Goddess because it's been quite a while.

I was hoping that eBooks would bring back the Rise of the Novella -- I think there's a lot to be said for stories in the 15-20-30K word range, but that's always been an awkward length for anthologies because you can't get more than 4 or 5 of them in a reasonable-sized collection.

Yes, Michael, that's one thing I remember from back in the day -- going into the bookstore and seeing shelf upon shelf of Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance books, and they were all exactly the same size.

For years part of my weekly routine was stopping at Uncle Hugo's and/or Dreamhaven to see if they had any Ballantine Adult Fantasy titles I hadn't seen before. Eventually, when I was down to just one or two that I was missing, I went ahead and ordered them off of alibris or abebooks or something which, on the one hand, lacks the romance, but on the other hand, I now have a complete BAF. So there are pluses and minuses.

Oh, and I got my copy of Deepest, Darkest Eden: New Tales of Hyperborea, which probably needs to move ahead in the queue.

Charles wrote: "Every bookstore ever is the Satan of the book world, tempting me to spend far more money on books than I have available."

Fixed that for you.

It looks like he died before completing it. Per de Camp, he'd start with a detailed outline, then go in and write individual sections in no particular order as the mood took him, so the book as published goes from fully fleshed-out narrative to outline and back several times.

The Zimiamvian books are also complicated by the facts that a) Eddison wrote the series pretty much in reverse chronological order and b) the final book he wrote (The Mezentian Gate) was left incomplete, although it includes relatively detailed summations of the sections he had yet to flesh out.

The simplest solution is probably just to read them in the order in which they were published -- Mistress of Mistresses, Fish Dinner In Memison and Mezentian Gate. But if you're really curious, L. Sprague de Camp gave an approximate reading order based on internal chronology in his Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy, a book I suspect would be of interest to most people in this group.

Michael wrote: "All of that traditional mythology is pertinent to the things I use in my own writing so it was a thrill to see someone else using that. I really want to get my hands on a good copy of The Worm Ouroboros. I've been meaning to read that for a while. ..."

The Worm Ouroboros is really something, although it can be a bit of a slog. I also liked Zimiamvia: A Trilogy, which is kind of a sequel (the relationship between Worm and Zimiamvia is ... complicated). Haven't read those in many years.

And speaking of Viking sagas: Styrbiorn the Strong just got reprinted a few years back. (After, of course, I bought a vintage hardcover.)

Zebra also did things like putting "In the tradition of Robert E. Howard!" on Talbot Mundy's Tros of Samothrace books and actually misnumbering a couple of the books in the series.

What I really liked about the second trilogy was how nonstandard it was -- the first volume brings us back to the Land but it's a Land that's been thoroughly broken and corrupted; then in the second volume we head across the sea to entirely new places.

What I noticed on my reread several years back is that Donaldson kind of likes to overcomplicate his prose.

I did enjoy Kingdom of Heaven (well, once I saw the director's cut) although I couldn't buy Orlando Bloom as the lead.

I liked the first two trilogies although yes, Covenant himself is a horrible, horrible person. (I read them repeatedly back in high school, then revisited them when the first new book came out.) So far I've only read the first book of the latest series and I have to admit I wasn't too impressed by it; but when the final volume comes out I'll go back and wrap things up.

Yep, some really good stuff in there -- you can never go wrong with Vance, Moore, Howard, Leiber. I also enjoyed Brust and Gemmell. And I really, really need to read more Brackett.

And after finding two of the Kyrik books I had to also lay hands on Kyrik: Warlock Warrior and Kyrik and the Lost Queen. Although for those I totally cheated and went to Amazon.

Charles wrote: "The Darkover series seems pretty mixed. Some are really pretty much SF. Many have a more Sword & sorcery feel to me than Sword and Planet, even though the setting would suggest S & P."

It's interesting that we had three distinct series (Darkover, Witch World and, to a lesser degree, Pern) that were all going at the same time and that were all kind of playing in that intersection between fantasy, sword & planet and SF.