 I'm happy to report that nudity returns to the Kyrik covers with this, the final installment in Kyrik's epic saga. I think it's pretty amusing how these books say "in the tradition of Conan" on the cover, as if it were even needed. Shirtless dude? Check. Naked chick? Check. Giant snake? Check. What other "tradition" could this book be following? In the tradition of Zorro? In the tradition of the Bronte Sisters? Hardly. ... Crossposted to Paperback Flash, my vintage paperback blog. ... .
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 If you look really closely and perhaps squint, you can make out a nubile young woman being carried off by a dragon/pterodactyl near the top of this cover, right under the words "In the Tradition of Conan". Sadly, she is not topless, which makes her the lone female to appear on a Kyrik cover wearing something over her nipples. It's not much of a covering, admittedly, but as a fan of smutty 1970s fantasy covers, I've got to say I was a little disappointed with this outing from painter Ken Barr. I mean, Kyrik is supposed to be a bit of a "dark" hero, no? Nice iguana in the foreground, though. That really pulls everything together. Here's the back cover copy: THE MIGHTY KYRIK FIGHTS THE DEMON WORLD
When Kyrik—warlock warrior—finds a dying man and a bloody parchment map, he is drawn into a whirlwind of evil in which demon lords contend for all Terra. With Myrnis, his gypsy sweetheart, and the aid of the thief pack, he brings five ancient magical gifts to the land of Surrilione—where he meets betrayal by the very demon lord he is forced to serve. Gary Gygax listed the Kyrik books in his fabled "Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading" in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide, which is how the ended up on my radar. The Kyrik books (as opposed to Gardner F. Fox's other barbarian hero, Kothar) are devilishly difficult to find, but I managed to complete the set last year without cheating and using the internet. I haven't read this (or its predecessor) yet, but I'm looking forward to it. The talk of demon lords and the release year of this book leads me to believe there may be a fair amount of AD&D inspiration in this one. I'll let you know once I've had a chance to read it all the way through. ... Crossposted to Paperback Flash, my vintage paperback blog.... .
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 Sometimes I post covers to Paperback Flash because I've just finished a great book and I can't wait to tell you about it. Other times I post a quick synopsis of a book I will surely forget in the next few months, and the post here is a mile marker for my memory when I'm later reading other works in the same genre or by the same author, in which case my posting here is almost purely for myself. And other times, as a service to the community, I like to post covers featuring green-haired women bearing their giant breasts. You're welcome. This beauty comes to us from the pen of one Ken Barr, on the glorious year of my birth, A.D. 1975. The subject (other than the woman and the awesome flying dino-horse) is the eponymous KYRIK: WARLOCK WARRIOR, the second of Gardner F. Fox's Conan clones. I've sampled a bit of Fox's first barbarian hero, KOTHAR, and was surprised by the originality of it, despite the fact that the main character is a carbon copy of Robert E. Howard's famous warrior. Kyrik, as I understand it, leads slightly darker adventures, and has some sort of demon sword (which probably makes him more of an Elric clone). I haven't had a chance to read any Kyriks, though I've managed to track all of them down over the last few years. They don't all have covers like this one, unfortunately. A quick word on Fox before I leave you to enjoy my Monday holiday. If the name sounds a bit familiar you probably know him from his extensive comic book work, which spans the late 1930s to the modern era (Fox died in 1986). He invented the concept of superhero teams with the Justice Society of America, invented heroes like Hawkman, re-invented most of DC Comics's stable of heroes (Green Lantern, Flash, etc.) in the early 1960s in tales that ushered in the "Silver Age" and then he teamed up all of the best ones in the new Justice League of America, which still exists in some form today. Fox was sort of the Stan Lee of the DC Universe, and comics fans justifiably canonize him as one of the major early authors in the field. But he also wrote his fair share of pulp, and a lot of it will wind up here on Paperback Flash in the months to come. ... Crossposted to Paperback Flash, my vintage paperback blog.... .
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 Since author Mike Resnick was nice enough to post a comment on yesterday's Goddess of Ganymede, I offered him a chance to share some thoughts about another of his early novels, Redbeard, from Lancer Books. I haven't yet read this one, having picked it up only within the last couple of months. I knew, however, that Mike held it in similar regard to his Ganymede books, which is to say early work he'd rather everyone forgot. Unsurprisingly, I'm rather partial to that sort of thing. I suspect Mike is, too, which is probably one reason why he collected several of Henry Kuttner's early (and sex-infused) science fiction stories in a great anthology entitled Girls for the Slime God.  So, with little to say regarding a book I haven't yet read, I thought I'd give Mike himself a chance to share some thoughts about Redbeard. To my surprise and delight, he sent me back a long email, which (with his permission) I've reprinted below: Memories of REDBEARD? OK.
I was at NyCon III, the 1967 Worldcon in New York, and while I was there I stopped in to see some of the publishers and editors — none of them science fiction — that I'd been writing for.
One of them was Walter Zacharius, who owned Lancer Books. I'd done some doctor-nurse romances and Gothics for him under pseudonyms, and I thought I'd see if he had any more work for me. When I got there he was amazed at the success of the Conan books. He'd picked them up for a song, these 30-year-old stories that none of the other mass market houses wanted, and hired Frank Frazetta to do the covers — and they were selling like hotcakes. He had no idea why, but he wasn't a man to let grass grow under his feet, and he decided it had to be the barbarian hero, and he told me to write him a science fiction novel with a barbarian hero.
So I did. And I sent it to Larry Shaw, Walter's editor, and Larry sat on it for 2 years. I kept writing and phoning every few months, telling him that this wasn't an off-the-street submission, that his boss had assigned it, but for two years he never looked at it. Then he either quit or was fired — no one was ever quite clear on which — and Bob Hoskins replaced him, found a 2-year pile of unread manuscripts, started with the oldest, and called me his third day on the job, knowing nothing about Walter assigning me the book, to make an offer, which I accepted.
Today I find the book an embarrassment — it's not the kind of thing I would ever write; it was an assignment from a hack publisher to a 25-year-old kid who didn't know any better — but surprisingly it got uniformly good reviews, which I guess says a little something about either the state of science fiction, or the state of reviewing, circa 1969. Every reviewer commented the unique characterization; after awhile I realized that all it meant was that they'd never encountered an un-beautiful heroine before.
-- Mike Thanks for the commentary, Mike! ... Crossposted to Paperback Flash. .
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 The Carnelian Cube, by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, is one of a handful of 1970s and earlier fantasy cited by Gary Gygax as significant influences upon the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game in Appendix N of his opus, the Dungeon Master's Guide. As D&D was a primary vector from which fantasy first entered my life and captured my imagination, I've always been especially enchanted with the books on this list. I've been seeking them out and reading them for years, and each one I cross off the list is a milestone in my reading history. I launched the Planet Stories fiction line at least in part thanks to my fascination with the pulp fantasy on Gygax's list. I came to The Carnelian Cube a few months ago with an open mind. I respect de Camp's efforts as one of sword & sorcery's pioneering paperback editors, but his dripping-with-disdain biography of Lovecraft and his less than up to the challenge Conan the Barbarian pastiches have always left a sour taste in my mouth. I eagerly await the de Camp novel that demands I raise my expectations, but it hasn't happened yet. Pratt is a tabula rasa for me. He famously collaborated with de Camp on the "Incompleat Enchanter" series (also on Gygax's list), which I haven't read. His The Blue Star appeared in Lin Carter's hugely influential Adult Fantasy imprint from Ballantine in 1969, a part of the bedrock of modern fantasy. But again, I haven't read it, so other than respecting both of these authors as early pioneers, I went in pretty blind. The Carnelian Cube first appeared in a 1954 Gnome Press hardcover, which is about as strong bona fides as you can get for early book-form sci-fi. My copy is a 1970 reprint of the '67 Lancer books edition, with a cover by Frank Kelly Freas, one of the genre's most higly respected artists. The book concerns a small cube of carnelian inscribed with mystical writing in ancient Etruscan. When the archeologist Arthur Cleveland Finch sleeps with the stone under his pillow, its magic transports him to the world of his desires, in the first case "a perfectly rational world." He awakens a resident of that world, with many details of world history and culture shifted to match his desires. Unfortunately, the cube is nowhere to be seen, and Finch must navigate the strange social landscape of a plantation called Strawberry House to discover it and eventually escape from an increasingly absurd and deadly escalation of tension that must surely end in his death. In Strawberry House he becomes Finch Arthur Poet, a man of art in a strictly regimented world. After falling afoul of the law for charges of advertising and indolence, Finch reclaims the carnelian cube and dreams of a world where and individual can be himself. Thing brings Finch to another version of pastoral Tennessee, this time dominated by an almost completely functionless society of violent nonconformists. When Finch confusedly offers his "Finch Arthur Poet" name from the previous reality, he gets pulled into the dangerous machinations of the Pegasus Literary Society, rife with psychics and murderers. He finds work as the coxwain of a tumultuous rowing crew, attempts to avoid the temptations of a beautiful woman, and realizes that a little conformity is necessary for survival. This is the lushest of the three realities presented in the book, with memorable names (and characters) like the bombastic Hyperion Weems, the temptress Eulalie, the native american ghost-spirit Ganowoges, and an effective sense of growing, dangerous chaos. Finch finds the cube and drifts off to sleep thinking of his home in the very first chapter, and of the digs of ancient Etruscan sites. He awakens into a world in which scientists brainwash thousands of subjects into thinking they are ancient warriors, setting them in bloody wars against once another to simulate important moments of ancient history. In the end Arthur Finch escapes this cold, immoral world of cold social science to escape to who knows where, and the cycle continues. Perhaps because it covers three distinct realities, and perhaps because it was written by two authors, The Carnelian Cube is often disjointed and difficult to follow. I went in expecting heroic fantasy but ended up with something written much more like a less-funny Vonnegut book, part whimsy and magic and part literary and serious-minded. I found some of the broad racial stereotypes (particularly the aforementioned Indian) in the book more difficult to excuse as a product of their time than in 1930s offerings from authors like Merritt or Otis Adelbert Kline, and I guess in the end I didn't think all that much of the book as a whole. As for what it really brought to D&D, it's pretty easy to say. The different realities of The Carnelian Cube are akin to pocket dimensions or demi-planes in D&D parlance, and the cube itself literally appears as one of the game's most powerful magic items. Dust off your old hardcovers and look up the cubic gate, and you'll find that it's described as being made of, you guessed it, carnelian. -------- Crossposted to Paperback Flash. .
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It's the annual Local Yarn Store tour weekend here in Seattle, which meant my girlfriend ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) bbcaddict was running at full octane over the last 48 hours in an attempt to visit 23 "local" yarn stores by the end of tomorrow. This year she managed to polish off 14 of them on a day off yesterday, leaving eight on the slate for today. The stores give out a free pattern and a stamp on the passport, which is entered into a drawing for a bunch of knitting stuff.
This year we were joined by alsofine and her husband yo_sarrian, good company under any circumstances. I'm not so much for the knitting (but I love the sweater, scarf, and gloves Danica's made for me), but I always tag along on the trip because it's a great chance to explore greater Washington just as the weather is turning from suicide watch to paradise. The tour also takes us up to Bellingham, a fun little town with two of the best used bookstores in the state.
This year we only had time to visit one of the stores, but it was enough to cost me about $30 in paperbacks. Ah, yes, the smell of pulp woos me much more powerfully than the smell of lanolin and menopausal hobbyists, and this year's Local Yarn Store tour produced quite an interesting paperback haul.
I'm getting to a weird place with my paperback collection. I actively collect about a dozen authors and generally keep an eye out for "sword and planet" and barbarian/sword and sorcery trash fiction. Essentially, if it's from before 1980 or so and it has the words "in the tradition of" and references to Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, I generally pick it up. If it features all of those things and, say, a naked female breast on the cover, I'll buy it automatically. But my personal collection is now better, often WAY better, than any used book store I can find, so I often end up leaving empty handed these days. Even the "behind the counter" vintage "quality" SF paperbacks on display at most stores offer nothing but stuff I already have or don't want.
But the Bellingham stores always cough up a few surprises.
Here's the haul from this year's Yarn Tour trip. I'll eventually get all of these covers up on Paperback Flash once I've cleared a lingering freelance assignment off the schedule and can truly waste time online without feeling tremendously guilty about it. In the meantime, here's the list:
Spearmen of Arn, by Del DowDell
Warlord of Chandor, by Del DowDell
Whom the Gods Would Slay, by Ivar Jorgensen (not, sadly, Robert Silverberg as I had hoped)
Berserker 1: Shadow of the Wolf, by Chris Carlsen
Berserker 2: The Bull Chief, by Chris Carlsen (with naked boobs on cover!)
Zanthar at Moon's Madness, by Robert Moore Williams (Yeah! Now I have all of the Zanthar books!)
Five Steps to Tomorrow, by Eando Binder (closing in on a complete collection of Binder paperbacks)
Warlords of Xuma, by David J. Lake (I've got the other book in this series, which is now complete)
Dream Quest 1: Halberd, Dream Warrior, by Lloyd St. Alcorn (sequel to On the Shoulders of Giants)
Redbeard, by Michael Resnick (Mike has all but disowned this, which makes me want to read it more)
I can't imagine reading much of that stuff any time soon, but I was pleased to find all of it.
Thanks, Yarn Tour!
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 Early this morning I finished reading my sixth book of the year, this time Robert Silverberg's Spawn of the Deadly Sea. The 38-page story appeared in the April, 1957 edition of the digest-size pulp Science Fiction Adventures, edited by Larry Shaw. Normally I wouldn't consider a 38-page story a "book," but the magazine calls it a novel on the cover and on the table of contents, and that's good enough for me. According to Silverberg, this was one of a slate of science fantasy adventures commissioned by Shaw specifically to echo the style of the classic pulp magazine Planet Stories, which had just been buried two years prior. Since I am currently publishing a revival of the Planet Stories brand in trade paperback, stories like this from authors I respect have a way of leaping to the top of the pile. It doesn't hurt that Spawn of the Deadly Sea involves one of my favorite staples of the pulp era—space Vikings. It's not exactly fair to call them "space" Vikings, since the entire story takes place on a far-future planet Earth, but the protagonists are a band of violent sea-raiders who travel around in many-oared longships, have Nordic names, and fight with axes. The "space" part comes in with the setting, a far-future version of Earth flooded thousands of years ago by amphibious aliens, and the victims of the Vikings axe-hackery, the aforementioned amphibious aliens. Plus there's a magical amulet, some telekinesis, and genetically crossbred man-sharks from the eugenics war against the original invasion so long ago. Spawn of the Deadly Sea is a lot of fun, reading far more like a sword and sorcery tale than a piece of science fiction. It's definitely pure adventure—there aren't any deep themes or pointed philosophical questions here, just a flooded Earth and lots of monsters getting killed with sharp metal. Like The Silent Invaders, Spawn of the Deadly Sea has one truly inspired "holy shit" moment, this time in the form of hundreds of man-sharks clogging a harbor to allow the human space Vikings to run from their ships all the way to shore. Unlike The Silent Invaders, this one didn't have a complex psychological plot, sympathetic protagonist, or quite enough space to tell a completely satisfying story. What it is is a fun romp, with Vikings. Which brings me to today's cover, Dream Quest 2: On the Shoulders of Giants, by Lloyd St. Alcorn. I'm a sucker for Viking fiction of all types (space or otherwise), so this novel caught my eye on a recent trip to Half-Price Books. The title and art give this one a whiff of a Harlequin romance novel, but since it involves a Viking crew discovering North America in the 10th century, I'm willing to give it a shot. "Lloyd St. Alcorn" is a pseudonym of author David N. Meyer, a Pope in the Church of the Sub-Genius. Strangely, my edition of this book is autographed on the title page—by Lloyd St. Alcorn! Gotta love a pseudonymous autograph. The Dream Quest trilogy ( Halberd: Dream Warrior, On the Shoulders of Giants, and Serpent Mound Dream) follows the exploits of Halberd Dream Walker, the mightiest of the Viking shamans, and appears to be Meyer's only book-length fiction offering to date (he's since written several non-fiction books). The back-cover copy also promises a witch, which suggests that there's at least a modicum of fantastic content in the books. Anyone out there read these books? I'm curious to hear if they're any good. ... Crossposted to Paperback Flash. .
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 This is the last Baroness book in my collection, but I think there are five more. The first three were all published in 1974, which is quite a feat. I strongly suspect that "Paul Kenyon" was at least a couple of guys in this incarnation, as there's only so much drek one man can write in the course of a single year. Right? Right? Here's the back cover copy from this gem: "THE BARONESS GETS HER MAN What's Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini, international playgirl and crack American superspy, doing marching across Mongolia with a hand-picked Soviet intelligence team? She's tracking down Dr. Thing, the mad Chinese inventor of an incredibly powerful laser death ray. And whether she's in bed with a handsome Russian agent or in the laboratory of a power-crazed genius, the Baroness gets her man!" I love that the Chinese villain is named Dr. Thing. I wonder if books are as blatantly racist as the Malko: Spymaster books in my collection. It'd be difficult to top those, so I'm going to vote no, but I should know better than to underestimate the evil powers of Lyle Kenyon Engel. Like Starbuck in tonight's Battlestar Galactica, Lyle Kenyon Engel was send to us from God himself to lead us to our special destiny. I mean, the guy's last name is "angel". It doesn't get more obvious than that. ... Crossposted to Paperback Flash. .
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 This just in! Breaking Lyle Kenyon Engel news! According to the comments thread on yesterday's Paperback Flash post, author and speculative fiction historian Win Scott Eckert is an unashamed collector of The Baroness tales, and has worked a "subtle crossover" into his forthcoming collaboration with the late Philip José Farmer, The Evil in Pemberley House! Will we discover that Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini is a member of the genre-spanning Wold-Newton universe? Does the Baroness turn out to be the titular ghost, unmasked near the roller coaster at the end of the novel a la Scooby Doo? I am eager to find out! Here's the back cover copy for today's book, the second in Lyle Kenyon Engel's The Baroness series of blockbuster spy-smut of the seventies. "THE BARONESS SWINGS INTO ACTION! Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini, the swingingest international playgirl of them all, is off for Brazil on a gay Carnival lark — and a top-secret espionage mission vital to America's survival. For unbeknownst to the handsome Rio cariocas whose beds she's shared, this voluptuous beauty is a cunning, deadly superspy out to smash an astounding neo-Nazi plot for world domination!" I haven't read the book (sadly), but Holger over at The Groovy Age of Horror has a fun run-down. ALSO: I've been spelling poor Lyle's name wrong. It's ENGEL, not ENGLE. A legend deserves to be remembered correctly. My apologies to Mr. Engel. ... Crossposted to Paperback Flash. .
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 Lyle Kenyon Engel strikes again! This time instead of ripping off Conan and John Carter of Mars, he's mixing James Bond with Modesty Blaise to bring us THE BARONESS! From the back of the book: "The Baroness packs in her sleek, voluptuous body the lethal power of a tigress. To the world, she'd known as Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini, model, millionairess, and international playgirl. But to a crack team of superspies she's "the chief" — the deadliest of them all. She knows how to make it hot for a man — in bed or in action!" Given the character's catsuit, it's difficult to imagine that the Baroness character from G.I. Joe isn't related to this product of the Lyle Kenyon Engel shop. Interesting that the pseudonym on this one, "Paul Kenyon," shares a name with the big man himself. A lot of websites have taken to assume that Lyle wrote these books himself, but I am somewhat dubious of this claim. He didn't write a lot of other stuff that appeared under his copyright, so I'm not 100% certain he wrote these. Of course, I am just getting to know about the guy, so I'm not exactly an expert. ... Crossposted to Paperback Flash. .
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 Ten or eleven years ago I was working in consumer public relations on an account for a large exercise machine manufacturer. As part of my just-out-of-college entry level position, I monitored coverage of the product in a variety of fitness-related media. Every month or so I'd get a packet from a service with all the clippings related to our client, as well as several industry magazines. The one that stood out the most was Exercise For Men Only, a men's fitness magazine filled with new ab routines, personal workouts from famous instructors, and coverage of fitness-related products and clothing. The thing about it, though, was that it pretty obviously wasn't an exercise magazine. What it was, bluntly, was a beefcake soft core magazine aimed at homosexuals thinly disguised as an exercise manual. I couldn't believe some of the photo layouts in the magazine. There was no nudity, of course (it was sold in supermarkets), but some of the crotch shots in particular were best described as suggestive. With that image in mind, we come to Dannus 5: The Slaves of Reglathium, a highly unusual sword and planet novel I picked up on a recent trip to Half-Price Books. I'm fairly well obsessed with sword and planet, having read most of the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories in the vein as well as those by lesser (but still enjoyable) imitators like Otis Adelbert Kline and Ray Cummings. I've even followed the genre to its graduation into the hands of its most skilled and literate practitioner, Leigh Brackett. I've read sword and planet from all these as well as from Gardner F. Fox and Michael Moorcock and Mike Resnick and others, but I have never before heard of Dannus, or any of the five books that share the awkward word "Reglathium" in their titles. The edition comes from Manor Books, and from the cover art to the back copy to (I presume) the story within, it comes off as a very tacky and cheap affair. The circular map of the world on page 6 is indistinct and difficult to read. Here's the back cover copy, in its entirety: "A RACE OF SLAVES After their perilous voyage across the Dark Straits, Dannus and his men landed on the sinister Feroonian Continent and began to explore its dark interior, traversing a range of fiery, molten hills as they do so [love that editing, there]. Following a river they came upon a gentle race of fair-skinned people now enslaved by the Feroonians, sickly creatures with monstrously enlarged heads. Realizing that the Feroonians rule only by means of thought control, Dannus and the once docile slaves destroyed the power of the oppressors forever. "THE SLAVES OF REGLATHIUM is the fifth and last of a series of fantasy novels about the career of the hero DANNUS, who fights for justice in the never-ending wars of the distant world, Reglathium. Other novels about DANNUS are: THE DARK STRAITS OF REGLATHIUM, THE PRISONER OF REGLATHIUM, THE CONQUERORS OF REGLATHIUM, and THE CAVES OF REGLATHIUM. "MOVE OVER CONAN! HERE COMES DANNUS" "Move over Conan" indeed. ... Crossposted to Paperback Flash. .
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 I may be out of Brak the Barbarian covers to show, but I've still got a pretty deep pile of John Jakes books. This curiosity came by way of my colleague Pierce Watters. "John Jakes reads good, like a mystery should." I love that. There's nothing fantastic about the four Johnny Havoc novels unless you count the fact that women would fall all over themselves to sleep with a five-foot-one red head Jakes imagined might be played by Mickey Rooney. This is the third book in the series, and the only one in my collection. I chose it tonight because my girlfriend Danica and I just finished watching the movie Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, with Val Kilmer and Robert Downey Jr. I thought it was a fun crime drama in the Elmore Leonard school, but the thing that struck me most about the movie was that the action was tied to a series of late-70s crime novels just like this one. They even used Robert McGinnis covers! I'd have posted more of those, but so far I only have one in my collection. For now The Doll Who Had It will have to suffice. ... Crossposted to Paperback Flash. .
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 There's something extremely satisfying about Ace Doubles, the two-in-one paperbacks that dominated science fiction in the 1960s. Sure, they were often butchered edits of longer books to get them to fit the rigid format, but when they work they work. Many of the books that editor Donald Wollheim chose for the line were British imports he could afford (which is why so much E. C. Tubb and John Brunner shows up in the line), while a large number were imports from the pulp era. That's how Leigh Brackett's The Sword of Rhiannon made its way into a 1960s Ace Double, and it's also how the above story, Robert Silverberg's The Silent Invaders became one half of a 1963 Ace Double. I finished reading The Silent Invaders about a week ago. It's the latest in a recent Robert Silverberg binge, and I found it an extremely quick read after Brackett's The Big Jump, which for some reason took me forever to read. The Silent Invaders opens with one of the strongest first paragraphs I've read in years: "The prime-class starship Lucky Lady came thundering out of overdrive half a million miles from Earth, and phased into the long, steady ion-drive glide at Earth-norm gravitation toward the orbiting depot. In his second-class cabin aboard the starship, the man whose papers said he was Major Abner Harris of the Interstellar Development Corps stared anxiously, critically, at his face in the mirror. He was checking, for what must have been the hundredth time, to make sure that there was no sign of where his tendrils once had been." Yeah! So Almer Harris is really Aar Khiilom, a highly trained religious warrior from the planet Darruu, who has come to Earth as a sleeper agent to ensure that the planet is not pulled into an alliance with the Darruuis' hated foes from the enemy planet of Medlin, with whom the Darruui have warred for centuries. The Medlin also have sleeper agents on Earth, likewise surgically altered from their monstrous alien forms to look like normal Earth people. Harris gets caught up in a Medlin honey trap and learns that Earth will soon be the dominant player in interstellar politics thanks to the emergence of a new race of psychic super-humans, forcing him to question the nature of his cultural conflict and twisting his loyalties. Because the story deals with masked sleeper agents, you never really know who's telling the truth and what the real deal is until the very end. Is there really a race of psychic Earthlings? Is Harris's Medlin love interest telling the truth, or is she merely using him to further the ends of her evil race? Or is the whole thing a put on by the Darruui, who simply seek to test the loyalties of Aar Khiilom? I honestly couldn't tell for two-thirds of the novel, which kept me turning each page at a rapid pace. When the truth is finally revealed, I couldn't believe Silverberg's audacity. I've read a lot of science fiction, but I've never before read about a super-advanced unborn psychic baby controlling things from inside its mother's womb. It's "holy shit" moments like that that make speculative fiction my favorite genre, and Silverberg is shaping up to be a master at this sort of thing. As soon as I finish The Atlantic Abomination I am on to another Robert Silverberg story, this time a fantasy tale called "Spawn of the Deadly Sea". ... Crossposted to Paperback Flash. .
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 In the spirit of The Atlantic Abomination, the John Brunner giant monster book that I'll likely finish tomorrow, the above book involves a giant monster as well. It's Terror on Planet Ionus, the 1966 paperback edition of the sole novel (so far as I know) of Hollywood writer Allen Adler. The original 1957 hardcover edition (from Farrar Straus and Cudahy no less!) was called Mach 1: A Story of Planet Ionus. Adler himself is an interesting character. He wrote the story for the screenplay for the movie Forbidden Planet and then got on the Hollywood blacklist during the Second Red Scare. The cover alone makes this book look like a hell of a lot of fun, and it's very near the top of the read list on the strength of the cover blurb alone. ... (Crossposted to Paperback Flash.) .
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 BRAK IS BACK! And for now, I'm sorry to say, this is the end of the line for Brak the Barbarian. This ugly-ass monstrosity is the most recent (and last) Brak book in my collection, a 1980 reprint of Brak the Barbarian vs. The Sorceress. Comparing this cover to the Frazetta on the original is, to put it lightly, a one-sided battle. This edition comes from an outfit called Tower Books. The only reference Wikipedia has on Tower is that they once had a comic book division that published Wally Wood's T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, which I vaguely remember seeing in comic shops in the early 1980s (but even those were from another publisher, as Tower's comics line shuttered in the mid-1960s). Tower Books is long gone now, and looking at the horrible cover above I'm thinking their design sensibility may have had something to do with the line's eventual demise. I'd prefer to post only the coolest, most interesting covers from my book collection here, but every once in a while I will put pure Fugly on parade. And I'm afraid this cover is nowhere near the bottom of the barrel as far as ugly covers go. It will get worse, but I have to leak these out in dribs and drabs, lest a bad cover drive anyone away or, perhaps, blind them. Here's what was happening in the world of John Jakes circa 1980. In that year, Dell released the final Brak book: The Fortunes of Brak, which included many (possibly all) of the as-yet unpublished 60s and 70s magazine appearances of the character into a final book. DAW had, three years previously, published The Best of John Jakes, which declared him "the nation's best-selling author." The edition pictured above calls him "America's most popular storyteller!" Woah, you might say. Hold on there! Brak the Barbarian books were once the best-selling books in America? Well, no. What actually brought John Jakes national fame were not his early fantasies, sci-fi, or westerns, but rather a very long series of historical romances alternatively called the "Bicentennial Series" or the " Kent Family Chronicles". These books were written to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and boy howdy did they cash in on the Bicentennial fever sweeping America. Apparently every single book in the 8-volume series sold more than 3.5 MILLION copies, and all of them hit the best-seller lists. The Kent Family Chronicles ended in 1979, by which point the series had spawned three made-for-television movies (one starring brilliantly named actor Randolph Mantooth!). With three TV films and eight best-selling novels, it was probably inevitable that the speculative fiction publishing companies wanted a slice of the pie, so this period also saw the most furious reprinting of Brak's tales, as well as numerous other stories from Jakes's fantasy and science fiction catalogue. Jakes mentions the Kent stories in his new introduction to this edition of Brak vs. The Sorceress, commenting about a guest at his daughter's wedding who asked him about Brak and his pleasure at knowing that the character was still fondly remembered. He goes on: "It was in the role of a dedicated Conan fan that I wrote the first Brak tale, "Devils in the Walls". In spirit, anyway, the story was a Howard pastiche, and I have acknowledged that fact more than once. Still, as literary characters often do, Brak soon took on a distinctive life of his own. Sometimes the changes in his personality, story to story and book to book, surprised even me." He concludes: "With a little luck, one of these days I may find the time to add some new pieces to the canon." That was in October, 1980. To my knowledge Jakes never returned to Brak the Barbarian, though he did produce another enormously successful historical romance series in the form of North and South, a Civil War-era trilogy that was filmed as an ABC miniseries in the mid-1980s. That was enough to trigger a final Brak revival from Star Books in 1987–1988, but so far as I know that series only printed the first three (of five) Brak books before petering out. As a final note, it's quite possible that the edition pictured above was published in 1981 and not 1980. Knowing what I know from publishing Planet Stories, it'd be almost impossible to have an author write an introduction in October and get the book out by the end of the year. Still, as 1980 is the only reasonable date that appears anywhere in or on the book, I'm sticking to it for now. Tower Books provides no printing data for this edition on the legal page, instead giving the original 1969 copyright date (helpfully stated in Roman numerals). The cover artist is also uncredited, though perhaps in this case the omission is a good thing. Until I pick up more Brak books, this will be the last Brak Attack for a while. There are plenty of other Conan clones to cover, and even some books that don't involve heaving thews at all. ... (Crossposted to Paperback Flash.) .
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 I like C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner so much that I've published 5 of their books so far in Paizo's Planet Stories line, and will likely continue to do so for as long as the market will let me. Today's volume, Earth's Last Citadel, is one of their most notable collaborations. Pictured above is the 1964 Ace Books edition, which was followed in 1977 and 1983 with subsequent editions. The earliest I can trace the story back is a 1950 Fantastic Novels appearance, but as that magazine largely published reprints (and since it called the book "unrivaled among fantasy classics" on the cover), I'm certain the story appeared somewhere else first. The story is this: In the middle of World War II, a hero and his thick-accented Scottish buddy are trapped in an African desert with a hot Nazi femme fatale and her brutish assistant. Just as their final battle is about to occur, they discover a weird sort of space ship buried in the sand, which they investigate, finding a weird room of null light within. The unusual, extraterrestrial entity within the ship puts them into a sort of hibernation after which they emerge into a nightmare version of Earth in the deep, distant future, on the eve of its extinction. Mankind is long gone, giant worms crawl in bizarre jungles amid the ruins of unusual stone cityscapes. The four humans get involved in a series of adventures involving degenerate humanoids, the weird alien from the space ship (a creature composed of light and darkness that is described in extremely evocative language that must have come from C. L. Moore), and bits of ruined technology. Like many pulp era tales, the characters are fairly wooden and one-dimensional, but the action moves swiftly and there are touches of absolute brilliance that bring it above much of the work published in the era. If you've read Moore's Northwest Smith and Jirel stories and enjoyed Kuttner's The Dark World, this is your logical next step with these two fantastic authors. Earth's Last Citadel will not disappoint. ... (Crossposted to Paperback Flash, my daily Wordpress blog experiment—now with 14 consecutive days of posting!) .
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 I wasn't lying when I said the Canadian Brak the Barbarian covers were trippy. I was, however, not entirely correct in calling them Canadian. Though the sample above is from the Canadian division of Pocket Books, I picked up Brak: When the Idols Walked this weekend, and it's got the same design as this cover minus the maple leaf logo. I'm thinking that this was simply a Pocket Books edition of the series, and I happened to first come across a version published by the Canadian division of the book line. To confuse things further, the book is also a "Kangaroo Book." I have no idea what this means, but I don't imagine it's "We think adults will enjoy this book of considerable literary merit." ... (Crossposted to Paperback Flash, my new daily Wordpress blog experiment.) .
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 On Friday I posted Frank Frazetta's cover to John Jakes's Brak the Barbarian Versus the Sorceress, the second of the four Brack paperback books. That volume and its follow-up, Brak the Barbarian Versus the Mark of Demons, were published by Popular Library, but this first volume came from Avon Books. The original came in 1968, the follow-up in 1969, from a different publisher. I wonder if there's an interesting story behind the switch. Either way, Jakes managed to snag Frazetta twice in a row. I think today's cover is unusual for Frazetta in that there's not much of anything going on in the background, and it's more monochromatic and somber than his usual compositions. What strikes me most about this cover isn't the art, but the text. It's difficult not to want to read this immediately. I'm leaning toward making it my next book, in fact. I suppose the change in publishers can account for the difference in composition between the first and second Brak covers. I'll soon try to post some of Brak's Canadian covers, which are among some of the most distinctive in my collection. ... (Crossposted to Paperback Flash, my new daily Wordpress blog experiment.) .
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It looks like the massive sales of The Children of Hurin are resulting in more unearthed J.R.R. Tolkien tales coming to print. The latest is The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, a retelling of an Icelandic saga written prior to The Hobbit.
Notes from Christopher Tolkien and a great deal of saliva from the mouths of Paizo customers and my old buddy John D. Rateliff to follow.
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I just added a pile of paperback covers to my Flickr account in anticipation of buying a pile of new books on a weekend trip to Oregon with bbcaddict on Saturday. You can click through any of the covers below to jump to my full photostream, which now contains 89 scans from my book collection.
On display below is the first leg of my Sword & Sorcery Vision Quest, an ongoing mission to read all of my S&S anthologies (35 books and counting). These are nearly all of the sword and sorcery-themed anthologies from the first decade in which they appeared, the swinging 60s.
 L. Sprague de Camp's first sword & sorcery anthology is the very first sword & sorcery anthology I'm aware of, debuting in 1963. Not only does the book contain a great author list (check out that cover!), but all of the illustrations are by brilliant pulp-era artist Virgil Finlay.  De Camp's second anthology (also with illustrations from Virgil Finlay) contains two of my very favorite sword & sorcery tales, "Bazaar of the Bizarre" by Fritz Leiber, and "Mazirian the Magician" by Jack Vance.  De Camp's third anthology was the subject of my first Sword & Sorcery Vision Quest post, and solidly represents the field of the era. That's John Jakes's Conan-clone Brak the Barbarian on the cover, by the way. There are more Brak covers in my photostream, and we'll be coming back to him later.  1968's Avon Fantasy Reader collects stories from the 50s magazine of the same name, edited by Donald A. Wollheim. Not strictly a sword & sorcery anthology, this book is notable for containing several stories from the founders of sword & sorcery none the less. I'm especially excited to read "The Sapphire Siren," by Nitczin Dyalhis, because I've been dying to read a Nitczin Dyalhis story since the first time I read his name. Wonder if it will live up to years of anticipation?  Lin Carter's first modern heroic fantasy anthology, 1969's The Young Magicians contains a lot of juicy meat, but you've got to chew through a lot of William Morris and E. R. Eddison to get to it. I was 5,000 words into my review of this book at the time of my last hard drive crash, and the idea of reading some of the stories again fills me with considerable dread. That said, "Through the Dragon Glass" is the story that made me fall in love with A. Merritt, so I can't fault this anthology too harshly.  Lastly, we've got 1969's The 2nd Avon Fantasy Reader, which is the last I have in that series. Like its predecessor, it's got a cover from Gray Morrow, a staple of 1960s SF covers. Again, great author list. The anthologies of the 1960s do a pretty good job of sticking to the classic, foundational authors of the genre (Howard, Kuttner, Moore, Smith, Leiber, and maybe Lovecraft and Dunsany) while offering just enough of the excellent new stuff (Michael Moorcock) without getting too deep into completely derivative drek (that sort of thing is coming--be patient). With that, I leave the blog to dream dreams of Powell's bookstore in Portland... .
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