The Moorcock Project: The Dragon in the Sword: 1

Just a reminder, my reading plan is here, with links to reviews of the two and a half John Daker books I've already read. On with the show.

Let's get the cover out of the way first. It's a stunner by Mark Salwowski...

No. Let's not get the cover out of the way first. Let's go off on a tangent.

No. We'll get back to that later. Let's get to the book. By way of a brief tangent.

There are people who worry about consistency (or the lack of it) in their series fiction.

Me, I grew up reading Conan Doyle, who wasn't sure if Watson's first name was John or James or if his old war wound was in the shoulder or leg. I also loved the old Universal monster movies, like The Mummy's Ghost, wherein poor Kharis sinks into a bog in Massachusetts. Somehow when he emerges again in The Mummy's Curse, that bog has moved to Louisiana. Examples from film and books, TV and comics could be multiplied indefinitely. The point is that I remember a simpler time, before the lunatics (God bless them) took over the asylum, when the Star Wars novels (all seven of them) didn't have elaborate timelines in the front showing you where they fit in "continuity".

So when it comes to issues dear to the fanboy's heart like "Is it canon?" I just smile and remember a favorite passage from the Good Book. I'm pretty sure it's somewhere in Luke. The disciples ask Jesus if Barbara Gordon's time as a Congresswoman is still in continuity, and Jesus says The Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath. He who has ears, let him hear. You schmucks. Which is good enough for me.

When Moorcock settled on the idea of a Multiverse to organize his fiction he managed to bypass the issue very neatly, if he ever cared about it (doubtful). An uncountable number of worlds reflecting and intersecting, merging and diverging. Men and women who are reincarnated a myriad of times either serially or simultaneously or, Somehow, both. Try to slap a timeline on that. Given conflicting stories, ask What really happened? and you will hear, very faintly, the Lords of Chaos laughing their asses off.

So we won't ask that question, merely note that the beginning of Dragon revises the events of Swords of Heaven, Flowers of Hell somewhat. Which is only fair because the Von Bek character in Dragon will in turn be revised/reused in the much later Dreamthief's Daughter.

Dragon was included in the massive Von Bek omnibus from White Wolf, but it's John Daker/Erekosë's book, narrated by him and propelled by his possibly hopeless quest for Peace, the Love of Ermizhad, and Understanding of his curse. (and what's so funny about that?)

Daker's curse is to be the one aspect of the Eternal Champion who remembers/foresees all his other lives. The knowledge oppresses him. He is weary and desperate, nearly suicidal. Enigmatic visions tease and torment him. Here he speaks in a dream to the ominous being called the Knight in Black and Yellow.

- Can you help me return to Ermizhad?

- I have already explained that you must wait for the ship.

- When shall I have peace of mind?

- When all your tasks are done. Or before there are tasks for you to do.

- You are cruel, Knight in Black and Yellow, to answer me so vaguely.

- I assure you, John Daker, I have no clearer answers. You are not the only one to accuse me of cruelty...

He gestured and now I could see a cliff. On it, lined at the very edge, some on foot, some on mounts (not all by any means ordinary horses), were rank upon rank of fighters in battered armour. I was close enough, somehow, to observe their faces. They had blank eyes which had become used to too much agony. They could not see us, yet it seemed to me they prayed to us - or at least to the Knight in Black and Yellow.

I cried out to them: Who are you?

And they answered me, lifting their heads to chant a frightful litany. We are the lost. We are the last. We are the unkind. We are the Warriors at the Edge of Time. We are the ravaged, we are the despairing, we are the betrayed. We are the veterans of a thousand psychic wars.

If the Warriors' chant sounds familiar you must be an old prog rock fan. In another vision Daker boards the Dark Ship which will carry/has carried him and his various selves to their appointed tasks. He speaks to the ship's blind and unnamed Captain, who tells him they travel to a place called the Maaschanheem...

- It is a world not far removed from the one you knew as John Daker. Far closer, in fact, than any you've journeyed to so far. The people of Daker's world who understand such things say it is one of the realms of their Middle Marches, for frequently their world intersects with it, though only certain adepts can pass from one place to the other.

Certain adepts? Or members of a certain family? Perhaps one with links to the Holy Grail and a somewhat disturbing motto, Do You the Devil's Work.

Enter Ulrich von Bek, dissident subject of the Nazi regime and would-be assassin of Hitler, who has fled into the Middle Marches with the aid of an old map, a family heirloom. He befriends Daker almost before the Champion steps off the boat and into his new body, and becomes his companion and confidant.

If you write a fantasy novel and decide to bring Nazis into it, even tangentially, you'd better have more on your mind than adventure or escape. Moorcock almost always does, of course. And you'd better have the skills to bend genre materials to serious purposes without becoming ponderous, tendentious or just plain boring. I'm only halfway through the book, but I would say Moorcock pulls it off, so far, though sometimes just barely. Mind you, this was 23 years ago (impossible!) when he was only 47 years old, a child really.

In these books - in most sword and sorcery books, actually - the traditional role of the Companion is to balance all the doom and gloom with a little humor and offer a ground-level viewpoint to counter the Champion's focus on the Big Picture.

Von Bek plays the part with a welcome twist. He is good-humored rather than humorous, and in place of an earthy pragmatism he possesses a somewhat cynical humanism. Wry, gallant, a bit formal, he has been disillusioned but not embittered by the rise of Hitler. As he and Daker make their way across the Maaschanheem and several other realms, encountering tyrants petty and otherwise, he offers frequent and pungent commentary on power, politics and human nature.

I haven't said anything about the actual plot of the novel and I'm not sure I'm going to. In one sense the plot of this kind of book is very much beside the point. It's a quest. Allies will help. Enemies will hinder. Wonders will be encountered along the way. But you already knew all that. So why fill in the details?

Especially since the details provide so much of the pleasure here. In your typical Tolkienoid fantasy figuring out what's what is mostly a matter of translating as you go along: Okay, these "Drogs" are the orcs, the ones they call the Mist Lords are elves but sexier, dwarves are called the Stonegrim, magic is magick, or Majik, or manna, or banana fana fofana, right, whatever, let's get this show on the road.

But Moorcock's stuff almost always rewards close attention. He has said that even in his lightest entertainments he tries to give good value, and a great deal of that value is in the details - details of landscape, architecture, dress, language, culture, ritual and, for lack of a better term, special effects. I've used the phrase profligacy of imagination once already in this series and if I'm really going to read almost every damn thing the guy has written I don't see how I'm going to avoid using it again and again. I'm tempted to call it- what the hell, I do call it the single most valuable resource he has at his command.

So more about the book in a few days, but without spoiling too many details. For now, here's that tangent.

Every used bookstore in the US has a scattering of British paperbacks. I mostly found UK cover art off-putting when I was younger. That's partly due to an unfamiliar aesthetic but mostly because when I first started reading sf every UK book seemed to have a cover (usually by Chris Foss) featuring some vast spaceship or monumental building looming over a landscape notably devoid of human beings or anything else I might actually give a damn about.

Not to rag on Foss. He does big machines and he does them like nobody else. When all the other spaceships were either silver torpedoes or gray bricks his colorful, oddly shaped ships were a welcome change. And obviously he's not responsible for his imitators or the decisions of art directors.

Megastructures. Robots. Spaceships. These are all an inescapable part of sf's iconography. But slapping a giant robot or a spaceship on every sf cover just contributes to the perception that sf is primarily about machines. Science fiction, like all fiction, is necessarily and always about people, though not always human people. And these covers became popular in Britain during the seventies, just at the tail end of sf's New Wave, a movement with its origins in the UK, reflecting a peculiarly English inwardness and pessimism. Spaceships were out. Inner space was in. So to speak. So what was with the technoporn?

Well, presumably it sold books, and not just in the UK, as this Ace edition of a Tiptree collection shows. The Foss art is pretty in its way but it hardly evokes the author's hard-nosed humanism. What good is a cover that sells the book, but guarantees that a good number of buyers will say WTF?! once they actually read the thing? Meanwhile people who would love the book turn up their noses at it because it looks like it's about large engineering projects on Mars.

Thanks to the invaluable and addictive Pop Sensation for the cover scan, by the way.

Back (finally) to the cover. The artist has a website with a generous gallery. The book cover section is sorted by author's name, which is handy. He's selling original art dirt cheap. Still out of my reach, but maybe not yours. He sells prints too, but if you're going to shell out for a high quality print why not spend a little more for some original art that will increase in value?

Salwowski is mighty fond of pinks and purples. He clearly prefers the Symbolists and Surrealists to, say, the Impressionists. He's done a handful of Moorcock's books. This incredible painting graced a Corum omnibus. I've never read the Corum books but he seems to be riding out of Paradise, down into some kind of gloomy, otherworldly exile. With a broken bridge behind him yet! Perfect. It seems unnecessary to mention the use of color but Wow!

Anyway, the cover of Dragon. Scroll back up and look at it again. Click on it to embiggen. I don't know if the vision of an enormous sword is actually in the book. It's not in the first half. It reminds me of a similar vision Elric experiences at a threshold moment in his life. I looked at the cover more than once before I saw the dragon's eye. Is the image inside it from Triumph of the Will? I'm damned if I'll watch it again to find out. I used to think everyone should be required to watch Triumph when they reach voting age, but I guess it's naive to think it might act as a kind of inoculation.

Bummer. I didn't mean to end with the Nazis.

This film clip always cheers me up. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, and everybody hates Illinois Nazis.

Recently read: Indiana Jones and the Philosopher's Stone

Picked this up at the Book Hut in Ocean Shores, Wa. It was in perfect condition and didn't have a sticker on it, and sure enough the nice lady running the place charged me retail for it and two others. I hadn't known they carried new books, and now my bill was about twice what I planned to spend.

Now look. I try not to let myself think of bookstores as charity cases in need of a handout, or public services I should support, like PBS . I've got kids, not to mention a serious book habit, and a gentleman junkie's gotta make his dollar stretch as far as he can. I'll buy a book used if at all possible, which, let's be honest, is a big screw you to the authors I admire so much as well as all retail sellers everywhere. And if I must buy new I don't let all those appeals to support my independent bookseller keep me from using the coupons Borders sends me every week, or ordering from Amazon with their deep discounts and 4-for-3 deals and free shipping.

I still pay full price sometimes, for the usual stupid reasons retailers have counted on since time immemorial. Mostly impulse buys at the grocery store where that seven bucks will be buried in this week's food bill (don't tell the wife). And of course there are some books you just gotta have now. Yesterday. Before the ink dries. So I've paid my retail dues, man. Don't try to lay your bourgeois guilt trip on this free spirit. Je suis un bohémien.

So I turned around and marched those books right back to their shelves.

No. No I didn't.

Because the Book Hut is one of those shops that every time you go back you're surprised to find them still in business, and they're moving next month into a space where they'll actually have to pay rent (they've been squatting in a church fellowship center of some kind). And I was on vacation, spending too much money anyway. And the nice lady actually had been very nice. And most importantly nobody wants to look like a cheapskate.

So I bought the books. A cultural history of Weimar Germany by Eric Weitz. A memoir by Bill Bryson. An original anthology from DAW, Cthulhu's Reign. And the Indiana Jones book, which I read in two big gulps that day and the next.

There are a dozen books in this series, by three different authors. They were originally published in the 90s and reprinted by Bantam a few years back to promote and be promoted by the fourth Indy movie. They all have gorgeous covers by Drew Struzan, who has never produced an ungorgeous cover and has been associated with Indy for a long time.

Struzan paints, but he uses rendering and shading techniques that make it look like a highly detailed pencil sketch has come to life in delirious technicolor. His stuff has a glow to it that turns realistic portraiture into a kind of hyper-realism. He's a little like Thomas Kinkade, except not evil and with more rotting heads on sticks. Maybe if Kinkade put more evil in his paintings his life wouldn't be oozing with it.

I've got two of these now and I might get the rest just for the covers. I'm definitely going to buy all the Max McCoy titles, because this one was a great read.

I don't want to overstate the case for this book. This isn't filet mignon disguised as hamburger. It's just a really good hamburger. Should you be reading a hamburger when life is short and more nutritious books are easy to find and just as cheap? Good question.

There's a fuzzy line between adult and young adult fiction and this book is aimed squarely at it. The grue is just gruesome enough. There's just the barest hint of titillation. A little educational content is mixed in. Indy - pardon me - Dr. Jones tells his students the story of Schliemann and Troy. Brief and painless infodumps are scattered about. There's even a kind of Notes for the Curious afterword explaining the historical realities behind the fiction.

Philosopher's Stone starts, as it should, with a fast-paced action set piece in a lost city. There's a native guide, a tomb full of death traps, bad guys (Italian fascisti in this case), etc. The story bounces from Central America to Princeton to London to Rome and finally to North Africa and another tomb, supposedly that of Hermes Trismegistus, "thrice-great Hermes", the man-god who founded the hermetic traditions and knew the secrets of alchemy. The macguffin that drives the plot is the Voynich Manuscript, stolen from Yale.

McCoy is very good with action and plotting, only a little less so with dialogue. He shifts point of view around a bit promiscuously in places, for my taste anyway. Nothing that will get in the way of your enjoyment unless you're hopelessly finicky about these things. He creates a suitably vile villain and a Love Interest Who is More Than She Seems, and he handles the recurring characters well: their voices, and the relationships between them. You can effortlessly imagine the respective actors in their roles.

I've given up on otherwise excellent books because the author stuffed period detail down my throat just to prove he did his research. McCoy doesn't make that mistake. He remembers the Great Depression was going on but no one is obliged to call a bum a "Forgotten Man". Indy empties his pockets at one point but the ticket stub that falls out isn't for The Garden of Allah, it's just a ticket stub. McCoy avoids blatant anachronisms and doesn't sweat the details. Babe Ruth is mentioned at one point. Somebody lights a Lucky Strike. That's plenty.

Early in the novel Indy is in bad shape. Unemployed, snubbed by his peers, feeling unappreciated and depressed, he visits Marcus Brody in New York. At this point, several years before Raiders, they have a business relationship, friendly but not close.

On the sidewalk in front of Carmine's, Indy thanked Marcus Brody for dinner and remarked that he felt better, though Brody should have warned him about the garlic. Brody laughed and observed that Indy did look better, although to himself he allowed it may have been from the reddish glow of the restaurant's neon sign.

"Where are you staying?" Brody inquired. "You are welcome to take up digs with me while you're here in the city."

"Thanks, but I'm afraid I would just be underfoot," Indy said. "You've worried enough about my health as it is. I think I'll take a stroll downtown and look for a quiet room where I can pass a day or two and organize myself. Study the Times want ads, polish my resume, that sort of thing (...)"

"Of course," Brody said. "But do keep in touch. If you need anything" -and by this Indy knew that Brody meant money- "by all means let me know. And, Indy- I know things will soon turn around for you. This business at Princeton is nothing but a misunderstanding."

Indy offered his hand.

Brody reached to grasp it, and Indy drew him into a bear hug.

"My word," Brody said when Indy had released him. His face had turned a few shades redder than even the neon sign could make it. "No need to be overly sentimental."

"No need," Indy agreed.

A nice moment that (among other things) reminds us of the friendship the two will share later, thus borrowing a bit of emotional capital from the movies we all know and, presumably, love.

Indy wanders the mean streets for a bit, interviews a conveniently knowledgeable bookseller and trips over a clue. Suddenly he needs to get to London fast, which in 1933 is a bit of a problem. He calls a contact in army intelligence and...

The airship U.S.S. Macon was a gleaming silver torpedo the length of two and one half football fields. On her sides were the familiar star-within-a-circle emblems of naval airpower, and the trailing edges of her tail fins were painted red, white, and blue. The American flag fluttered in the breeze beneath a gun-port that bristled from her tail. The taxi that wheeled up beneath her belly at the U.S. Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, New Jersey, seemed like a toy in comparison.

The Macon had been towed out of her enormous, cocoonlike hangar and was slowly beginning to lift skyward for her maiden flight across the Atlantic. The navy would not permit her schedule to be delayed for the arrival of a last-minute civilian passenger, although it would grudgingly allow passage - if the tag-along could arrive on time.

Indy arrives in the nick of time and steps aboard. Booooriiing! Try again.

An army staff car was parked beneath the dirigible, and a fresh-faced lieutenant bounded out of the car to meet Indy. In his hand was a thick brown envelope.

"Dr. Jones," he said, "the major instructed me to give you this."

"Thanks." Indy tucked the envelope inside his jacket.

...

"I'm sorry you didn't make it in time," the lieutenant said. Indy looked skyward. The aircraft hid the sun, covering the field in an unnatural twilight; (...) She was under power, and began to rise. On command, the sailors were releasing her mooring lines, beginning with the lines at her tail.

Admitting defeat, Indy walks away, planning his next move. You know better than that.

"She's not gone yet," Indy said.

He hesitated a moment. A trio of husky sailors struggled with the mooring line dangling from the dirigible's nose, waiting for the command to release.

"I know I'm going to hate this part," Indy said.

The defining quality of genre fiction is that it fulfills expectations. You can do it in an unexpected way or with a knowing wink or what have you, but you must give the customers what they paid for. If you don't you're playing a different game with higher stakes, and God go with you.

Fulfilling those expectations isn't just a negative matter of "stay within the lines or displease your audience". The writer, if he is not merely pandering, leads a kind of call-and-response with his genre-savvy readers. The moment Jones is told he didn't make it you know he's going to get on that ship. McCoy draws out your anticipation for a few paragraphs, increasing the pleasure, then Indy is off and running. A character raises passenger pigeons. Later those birds will be used to send messages. Someone keeps a Louisville Slugger in his cabin. That bat might as well have This machine kills fascists inscribed on it. The book is full of such pleasures, and if that doesn't recommend it to you, you should put down the bullwhip and fedora and play elsewhere.

Bought: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

This article by John Siracusa has nothing to do with Hitler or Nazis. I'll get to them. It's about the reasons e-books haven't caught on big yet, and why they will nevertheless replace paper. There's also a good, concise explanation of why DRM is a colossal boondoggle. The iPad has premiered since it was written, so the author's baffled exasperation that Apple isn't selling e-books dates it. But it's still worth a read, with tons of great links. I recommend it to anyone who still reads anything printed on paper. It convinced me, much against my will, that old fashioned books are on the way out, and probably sooner than anybody thinks. Here's a snippet.

If you remain unconvinced, here's one final exercise... Take all of your arguments against the inevitability of e-books and substitute the word "horse" for "book" and the word "car" for "e-book." Here are a few examples...

"Books will never go away." True! Horses have not gone away either.

"Books have advantages over e-books that will never be overcome." True! Horses can travel over rough terrain that no car can navigate. Paved roads don't go everywhere, nor should they.

"Books provide sensory/sentimental/sensual experiences that e-books can't match." True! Cars just can't match the experience of caring for and riding a horse: the smells, the textures, the sensations, the companionship with another living being.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Did you ride a horse to work today? I didn't. I'm sure plenty of people swore they would never ride in or operate a "horseless carriage"—and they never did! And then they died.

Zing!

And then they died. That pearl of wisdom reminded me of a quote I've been attributing to James Clerk Maxwell. It took me forever (30 minutes!) to track it to the actual source, nineteenth century Harvard professor Joseph Lovering. He used to tell his students, "There are two disparate theories of light, gentlemen, the wave theory and the corpuscular; today, one hears only about the wave theory, because all those who believed in the corpuscular theory are now dead."

Boo-yah!

Let's hear it for Death, the Great Convincer, who changes the mind of Mankind without changing a single individual!

I hope to instill a love of reading in my sons, but I am making peace with the fact that I will never make them love books the way I do, not least because they can see for themselves that even their book-loving father spends more time reading a computer screen than any book.

You'd think an old sf fan would be better prepared for this, but I never in a million years imagined I might live to see the end of the morning paper, the magazine rack, the bookstore, the public frickin' library.

Yet that doesn't seem at all far-fetched now. It seems entirely reasonable to think that in 20 years:

Newspapers will be nonexistent.

The few remaining print magazines will be curiosities, available by subscription only to an aging group of aficionados.

And any book made of paper will be by definition a special edition, either printed and bound on demand by a vending machine in the lobby of your assisted living community or lovingly published by a small press in an edition of a few thousand, to be sold online at collector's prices.

Libraries, of course, are vulnerable to politics as well as economics. I want to shy away from politics here, except to affirm that yes I do believe that public libraries as well as public schools, public radio, public health, public art and even public hand-holding are all good things.

Politics aside, the economics are bad enough. Here's a post about cost per circulation by LibraryThing founder Tim Spalding. Here and here and here and particularly here are more of his grim but frighteningly reasonable posts. This blog is a great resource for links and wisdom, aimed more at librarians and with a little less doom and gloom. Read this guy too, 'cause I know you've got all that spare time on your hands. The big question nobody really wants answered is this: if you can "borrow" a book via download, in your home or on the bus, what purpose does that big brick building downtown serve, other than as a place to duck in and use the restroom?

It's a bit off-topic, but we might as well hit the USPS while we're at it. Cheap postal service is possible because the truck stops at every house, reducing the cost per delivery. The junk mail industry is the only thing propping it up now. When they move their money online, POOF!

None of this is news, but putting it all down here makes me feel all future-y and just a little bit dystopian. It's not holodecks and jetpacks, but an old fanboy's gotta get his gosh-wow where he can.

The slow but steady demise of the mass market paperback is one of the signs that paper books are on the way out. For years a "pocket" edition of something like The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich made economic sense because the publisher could count on casual readers finding it in airports, drugstores, etc. That's what mass market meant: books intended for sale outside of bookstores. But thanks to technology and mortality casual readers have been replaced by casual gamers. The old markets have dwindled. The cost of getting a book on the shelves has risen drastically, and prices have followed. The math has shifted steadily in favor of trade paperbacks with their higher profit margins. Today almost all nonfiction (and most fiction other than bestsellers and genre titles) comes out in trade.

E-books, which effectively have zero overhead, are a natural to replace paperbacks as the mass market edition, for sale 24 hours a day, where ever you are. Right now prices are being kept artificially high to shore up the old system of distributors and retailers. But the overhead for physical books will continue to rise, while demand for them drops. Sooner or later e-book prices will start to reflect their real cost, and hardcovers and trades will start pricing themselves out of the market.

To recap, it's the end of the world as we know it. Also, I bought a book!

Used of course. Used bookstores may actually have more life in them than retail. Stubborn old booklovers will be driven to them as new paper books disappear. A lot of people (and libraries) will be selling their old analog books as they switch over to digital. I suppose used bookshops will gradually be absorbed into the antique stores as their customer base dies off and their stock becomes, well, antique.

I found The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer, a mint copy of a 20 year old mass market paperback, on the dollar rack outside Half Price Books. I keep finding amazing old nonfiction paperbacks there and I'm convinced HPB is just dumping all they get rather than put them on the shelves with the trades and hardcovers. Their reasoning isn't hard to guess but really I don't care as long as they keep doing it.

There's not much to say about the cover. Almost every edition of Rise and Fall has closely followed the same rather austere template. It's a classic of its kind, almost iconic. It reminds me of, and for all I know it may have inspired, this fantastic early cover for Hunter Thompson's book on the 1972 presidential campaign, featuring the work of the late Tom Benton. Apropos of nothing, in 30 years of haunting bookstores I've never even seen this edition, in any condition.

Shirer was an American print journalist covering Europe between the wars. In 1937 he got a call from future legend Edward R. Murrow of CBS. One dinner and one voice test later he had a job in radio. He and Murrow and some other punks flying by the seat of their pants improvised a lot of what we think of as broadcast journalism.

All this and much, much more is in The Nightmare Years, the second volume of Shirer's three part memoir 20th Century Journey. Like a lot of people I've only read the middle book. I wouldn't call Shirer a great writer, but he was a great reporter: sympathetic, shrewd, persistent and for the most part lucky. He seems to have gone everywhere, seen everything and talked to everyone.

Murrow went on to become the quintessential celebrity journalist. Shirer (on the right) did not, but he did write this massive international bestseller, along with the equally massive companion volume The Collapse of the Third Republic.

I probably won't be reading Rise and Fall anytime soon, in part because Nightmare Years, besides being a personal memoir, is in itself a very good history of events in Germany and throughout Europe from 1930 through the end of 1940. But mostly because a few years back I read a more recent history by Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich, which impressed me deeply and affected me rather oddly.

Burleigh's approach is the opposite of sensational; he doesn't dwell on the horrors of war or mass murder any more than is necessary. He is in fact rather analytical and I didn't have a strong emotional response to the book at all while I was reading it, beyond the familiar pleasures of reading good prose and learning new things. But once I finished it, I set the book down, sat there looking at the front cover for a few minutes, and started to weep. For about 15 minutes I just sat there at the dining room table and cried, not thinking about anything in particular, just overwhelmed by horror and pity. I cried off and on the rest of the night.

So I think I've done my time in Nazi Germany, at least for a while. I'm not sure I ever want to experience anything like that again. And if I read a book that covered the same ground but didn't provoke that kind of response I'd be left wondering whether that represented a failure on the author's part... or on mine.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Oh, Who Am I Kidding?

Unless you're a fairly serious Moorcock fan (or just like long lists) you should probably skip this post. Go to Diversions of the Groovy Kind instead and read some of the finest, funkiest comics ever published. Go on.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that when I said I planned to read the complete Moorcock in a year I didn't mean a calendar year as such, but a year's worth of days, spread out over a period of approximately mumble mumble. Sound good? Good.

Rather than keep linking to that suggested reading order that I'm not quite following, I'm going to post my own variation on it here, annotated, and with links for the few books I've already written about. I will add links as I continue (God willing) so this page will act as an index to the whole demented project.

Titles marked (s) are short fiction.

The War Hound and the World's Pain - 1, 2
The City in the Autumn Stars - 1, 2
The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius (s) - 1
Introducing the Von Bek family, guardians of the Grail.

The Eternal Champion - 1
Introducing John Daker, an aspect of the Eternal Champion burdened with memory (or foreknowledge) of all his incarnations.

The Sundered Worlds - 1, 2
Space opera that introduces the multiverse, sort of. Also a Von Bek novel, sort of.

Phoenix in Obsidian - 1
John Daker again.

To Rescue Tanelorn... (s) - 1
A tale of Rackhir the Red Archer. Can't remember how this got in here but it does introduce the eternal city Tanelorn. So.

The Swords of Heaven, the Flowers of Hell (graphic collaboration w/ Howard Chaykin) - 1
The Dragon in the Sword - 1
More John Daker. Dragon is the "final" Daker novel, whatever that means. It also features a Von Bek sidekick.

The Final Programme
Introducing Jerry Cornelius, an ambiguous Eternal Champion for a world perpetually on the brink of apocalypse. Our world. The idea of reading all the Cornelius stories at one go makes me dizzy, so I'll be spacing them out (though they're pretty spaced out to begin with, har) between less demanding sequences.

The Jewel in the Skull
The Mad God's Amulet
The Sword of the Dawn
The Runestaff
Introducing Dorian Hawkmoon, hero of a far-future Europe. A second Hawkmoon sequence forms one of several "climaxes" of the Eternal Champion's story, and will be found near the end of this list.

A Cure for Cancer (Jerry Cornelius)

The Knight of the Swords
The Queen of the Swords
The King of the Swords
The first Corum sequence, set in the prehistory of Earth (not necessarily our Earth)

The English Assassin (J.C.)

The Bull and the Spear
The Oak and the Ram
The Sword and the Stallion
The second Corum sequence, with elements from Celtic folklore.

The Condition of Muzak (J.C.)

The Ice Schooner
The Black Corridor
The Distant Suns
Flux (s)
The contents of Sailing to Utopia, part of the omnibus series from the 1990s.

The New Nature of the Catastrophe
The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius: Stories of the Comic Apocalypse
The Visible Men (s)
Modem Times (s)
All the Jerry Cornelius short fiction. I think. Catastrophe includes stories by other writers, which I plan to skip, at least for now.

The Warlord of the Air
The Land Leviathan
The Steel Tsar
Alternate Victoriana featuring the wonderfully-named Oswald Bastable.

The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century (J.C.)

City of the Beast
Lord of the Spiders
Masters of the Pit
Burroughs pastiche set on "Mars" in the distant past.

The Entropy Tango (J.C.)

An Alien Heat
The Hollow Lands
The End of All Songs
The Dancers at the End of Time sequence. A love story set among decadent immortals on a dying Earth.

The Alchemist's Question (J.C.)

Legends from the End of Time
More End of Time stories.

Gold Diggers of 1977 (J.C.)

Earl Aubec (s)
Elric: The Making of a Sorcerer (graphic collaboration w/ Walt Simonson)
Elric of Melnibone
The Fortress of the Pearl
The White Wolf's Song (s)
The Sailor on the Seas of Fate
Elric at the End of Time (s)
The Weird of the White Wolf (w/ some recent short stories interlaced)
The Vanishing Tower
The Revenge of the Rose
The Bane of the Black Sword (w/ The Last Enchantment (s) inserted)
Stormbringer
The main Elric sequence. Poor doomed Elric will make more appearances later, via dreamquest.

The Chinese Agent
The Russian Intelligence
Humorous spy novels featuring Jerry Cornell, who is just what he sounds like: not quite Jerry Cornelius. Looking forward to these. I read Chinese Agent in my early teens, probably too young to appreciate it.

The Wrecks of Time
The Winds of Limbo
The Shores of Death
The contents of The Roads Between the Worlds, part of the 1990s omnibus series.

Earl Aubec
The Metatemporal Detective
The Best of Michael Moorcock
Sojan the Swordsman (s)
The Stone Thing (s)
The Roaming Forest (s)
London Blood (s)
London Bone (s)
Through the Shaving Mirror (s)
Furniture (s)
Iron Face (s)
Stories (s)
The Affair of the Texan's Honour (s)
The rest of the short fiction.

Gloriana, or the Unfulfill'd Queen
Fantasy set in an alternate England during the reign of an alternate Elizabeth I. Moorcock revised this novel, then apparently unrevised it, so I guess there's no reason I shouldn't read the first edition. If I can find it.

Behold the Man
Breakfast in the Ruins
Two novels featuring Karl Glogauer. Not necessarily the same Karl Glogauer. Behold the Man is Moorcock's most controversial book, at least in America, where he has reportedly received death threats (Jesus + time travel = trouble). Another book I was probably too young to appreciate.

The Brothel in Rosenstrasse
Historical novel linked to the Von Bek series.

Count Brass
The Champion of Garathorm
The Quest for Tanelorn
The second Hawkmoon sequence. First climax of the Eternal Champion's story.

King of the City
Mainstream novel set in contemporary London, sort of. Also a Jerry Cornelius novel, sort of. With Moorcock, nothing is simple.

Blood
Fabulous Harbors
The War among the Angels
The Second Ether Trilogy, another climax of the Eternal Champion's story.

Michael Moorcock's Multiverse (graphic collaboration w/ multiple artists)
Second Ether, Metatemporal Detective, and Elric Dreamquest tales converge to a common climax. Cool!

Mother London
Kaleidoscopic, hallucinatory history of London from the Blitz to the Iron Lady. Stark realism, in other words.

The Dreamthief's Daughter
The Skrayling Tree
The White Wolf's Son
The Dreamquest Trilogy featuring Elric and the Von Bek family, with cameos by Bastable and others. The final climax of the Eternal Champion series. So far.

Byzantium Endures
The Laughter of Carthage
Jerusalem Commands
The Vengeance of Rome
The Between the Wars Sequence. Straight historical fiction following the exploits of anti-heroic Colonel Pyat, a minor character from the Cornelius books. Born with the twentieth century, Pyat is, as I recall, destined for Auschwitz. So. Not the most uplifting way to end this, but it doesn't fit in anywhere else and it's too important to skip.

I think that's everything of consequence, though there are some marginal cases...

Pseudonymous work and juvenilia? Not unless something really interesting catches my eye.

Nonfiction, including Wizardry and Wild Romance? Probably not, but I recommend Wizardry, a critical overview of the fantasy genre, especially if you've got any sacred cows you need slaughtered. At the moment it's in print again.

His musical career? Moorcock was in a band called The Deep Fix and wrote stuff for Hawkwind and Blue Öyster Cult. Album reviews would only showcase my profound ignorance of all things musical. I might post the lyrics of "Veteran of the Psychic Wars".

He and James Cawthorn wrote the screenplay of Amicus Films' The Land That Time Forgot. That might be fun, actually. Rubber dinosaurs. Cave People. Troy McClure. I mean Doug.

Oh, and there's a Doctor Who novel (!) to be published later this year. It'll have to be shoehorned in somewhere. Also in the works are a revised Modem Times, a Jerry Cornelius story called The Blue Poppy, The Whispering Swarm (first of a planned trilogy), Stalking Balzac, and God knows what else.

Further afield, there are the adaptations and parodies. Robert Fuest's film of The Final Programme. A slew of comics and graphic novels. Elric's peculiar guest appearance in Marvel's Conan comic. Elrod of Melvinbone in Dave Sim's Cerebus. Various ideas and characters lifted by Gygax and Arneson for D&D. And there are dozens of authorized short stories by other writers, mostly featuring Cornelius or Elric. It could go on and on.

Whew! One step at a time, old man. The Dragon in the Sword. Read it. Scan the cover. Write something coherent about it. And for the sake of accuracy, change the name of this series to

The Moorcock Project.

Bought: James Bond and Moonraker

That's right, not Moonraker, a novel by Ian Fleming. James Bond and Moonraker, a novel by Christopher Wood.

You know your movie has strayed pretty far from its source material when you decide you need to commission a whole new book instead of just slapping movie art on the original.

I recently saw Francis Coppola's Dracula again and was reminded that when it was first released (almost two decades ago!) they had it both ways. You could buy the tie-in edition of Bram Stoker's novel, or a novelization by screenwriter James V. Hart and sf author Fred Saberhagen. Or both, I suppose. The cover of the novelization emphasized the romance/reincarnation element, totally absent from Stoker's book. I wonder which sold better? I also wonder if the novelization was, like the original, an epistolary novel. Saberhagen must have been tempted, at least. His own The Dracula Tape (1975) takes the form of a transcription of a taped statement by Dracula himself, retelling Stoker's story from his viewpoint. Coincidentally, Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, in which a man tapes a vampire's life story, was published the next year.

Back to the matter at hand. Christopher Wood was the credited screenwriter of Moonraker and co-writer of The Spy Who Loved Me, which also got a novelization, also by Wood. Someday I'll find a nice copy of it. There are recent(ish) and slightly overlapping interviews with Wood here and here. He is still writing and seems like a nice guy.

The art is uncredited (of course) but according to this magnificent blog the artist is Robert McGinnis, and the longer I look at it the more that seems right. McGinnis is not usually associated with spacesuits or ray guns, but of course he used to be all over adventure, spy and (especially) crime paperbacks. He's best known for his scantily clad women, so I'm surprised our hero is alone here. I like it, but if I commissioned a McGinnis and didn't get at least one pretty girl with bedroom eyes I think I would feel ripped off.

It took me a while to realize that Bond is wearing a tux under his vacuum suit. I don't remember that from the movie, but I confess I don't remember much of anything from the movie. Didn't he pull the same gag with a wetsuit in another flick?

I'm happy to know that McGinnis did the cover, because theft is an ugly thing and the above image is clearly based on this one, which is unmistakably his work.

This is also a much better portrait of Roger Moore. On the Moonraker cover he looks softer, somehow. He almost has puppy-dog eyes, and his mouth looks pouty rather than sardonic.

And am I crazy or does Space-Bond look just a little... ethnic? Maybe it's the big brown eyes (Moore's are blue) or his excellent tan. Does the starlight on his hair make it look a little curly?

Okay, so I'm crazy, but it reminds me of talk a while back that the next actor to play Bond should be black. My own vote is for Adrian Lester, who has serious dramatic chops and is long overdue for a breakout movie. In a better world his role in Primary Colors (the lead, though Travolta was top-billed) would have done the trick. He doesn't really have the cruel and craggy thing going on, at least in anything I've seen, but that's what acting is for, duh.

By ancient tradition I am required at this point to reveal my favorite Bond (Moore), Bond actress (I will not call Dame Diana Rigg a Bond girl) and Bond movie (For Your Eyes Only). The pre-title sequence of Eyes can be seen here after a short commercial (sorry). Sap that I am, I'm touched to see Bond leaving flowers on his wife's grave. As far as I remember it is the last time the series acknowledged the passing of time, or that Bond was a widower. In 1981 it was still believable (just barely) that a man born in 1924 was still globe-trotting, bed-hopping and world-saving. After this Bond would, of necessity, become untethered from his post-war origins.

Some fans hate the way the venerable Blofeld is subsequently (and rather humorously) dispatched before the movie proper begins, but the filmmakers didn't do it thoughtlessly. His death was intended to signal the end of the Dr. Evil-type supervillains bent on world domination, and a return to slightly more realistic spy adventures rooted in the Cold War. Eyes delivers that admirably, with a few lapses. It also includes my favorite Bond kill, the death of the assassin Locque. It really should be seen in context, but if you don't have time or desire to seek out the movie the trailer gives it away. Skip to 2:26 if you don't even have time to watch a lousy four minute trailer for crying out loud.

Bought: Memory

I have a frequent and fervent desire to go back in time and slap my younger self around.

I hated DAW Books when I was a teenager. I bought the Elric books because of the Michael Whelan covers and because my God it was Elric, the doomed, drug-taking albino sorcerer whose black blade demanded souls! (If Tolkien was beer and D&D was pot, Elric was basically crack.) But I didn't buy any other DAWs until much later. It was the spines that did it. The thought of all those identical yellow spines with the author's name in red and the title in black just rubbed me the wrong way. Book covers should be as varied as their contents, I thought. Didn't these DAW people understand that? Were they just too cheap to spend the money? Too lazy to make the effort? Didn't they care?

Now that I'm older and a bit wiser I realize that the yellow spines were an example of cheap and effective branding. DAW was hoping to foster brand awareness and, if at all possible, loyalty. Books are products, after all. Especially genre books. That bare fact is at odds with the reverence I had (and have) for books, my conviction that they aren't just products to be consumed, like bananas or beer. Books are special. Books are the collective memory of our species. Etc., etc. A publisher that makes their books visually indistinguishable is tacitly saying that they are interchangeable. Etc., etc.

Cue fantasy:

Idiot! *SLAP* You pompous, ridiculous snob! *Suh-LAP* Do you know how much Morlock Night is going to sell for in 30 years?!!

*EPIC SLAP*

The books I could have read! The worlds I might have explored! Back in my prime exploring years when my heart was a bonfire and my imagination was unbounded and I could swallow seven different kinds of horseshit, each more absurd than the last, as if it was the word of God made flesh and dipped in pure milk chocolate!

*Sigh*

Now I own more of those old yellow spine DAWs than I can easily count (I counted them anyway: 274). I seek out the yellowest copies, the ones that haven't faded from exposure to sunlight. Oh the irony. I toy with the idea of trying to complete a set. Only 580 of them were published, give or take. I'm almost half way there.

DAW was a cool and quirky publisher in many ways. They were the first mass market publisher devoted to sf and fantasy. They published a lot of foreign language sf in translation - Gerard Klein, Pierre Barbet, Herbert Franke, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. They published very good, long-running "year's best" anthology series for sf, fantasy and horror. In a field dominated by men many of their best and most prolific writers were women: Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton, Tanith Lee, C. J. Cherryh.

And the covers! Whelan. Josh Kirby. George Barr. Kelly Freas. Bob Pepper. Vincent Di Fate. Don Maitz. A lot of the books had some interior art as well. And as far as I know DAW always credited their artists on the copyright page. You might think that would just be common courtesy, to reader and artist both, but until quite recently it was all too rare and it still isn't universal.

So Viva DAW! Long may they publish, though the yellow is long gone and most of the quirks have been worn away by the years. And all due praise to their late founder Don A. Wollheim. According to their website they are still privately owned, though apparently they have some kind of distribution deal with Penguin.

And Viva Hard Case Crime! Of course I noticed the line of retro hard-boiled paperbacks when they started showing up on retail shelves, but the similarity to DAW didn't occur to me until I began actively looking for them at my local used book shop. The white Hard Case spines - author in black, title in red - are almost like a negative image (evil twin?) of those old DAWs. They're not quite as distinctive, but they stand out enough that you can scan the shelves at speed and count on spotting them.

I've only got five Hard Case books so far, with four more on the way from Amazon where, at the moment, they qualify for a 4-for-the-price-of-3 promotion. Collecting crime fiction is only a sideline with me. Most of the crime paperbacks I own were bought for the covers, though I read John Dickson Carr voraciously for a while, and I'm a fan of John le Carré (spy fiction is technically crime fiction, right?) and Gregory Mcdonald.

And Donald Westlake. Which brings us, finally, to Memory, and this fantastic cover. There's a good review of the novel on this excellent blog, which includes a link to an article on this other excellent blog that explains how this almost fifty year old story ended up being published now, posthumously.

I just want to draw attention to the cover. The design of the Hard Case books is meant to evoke the golden age of paperbacks. The breathless blurbery. The yellow ribbon with crown and gun logo. And especially the cover art. They commission new paintings from old masters like Robert McGinnis (whose site seems to be in limbo - a sampling of his paperback work is here and other commercial work can be found here) and young turks like Glen Orbik. All of it defiantly old fashioned.

And then there's this sucker, with Orbik art but otherwise like nothing else Hard Case has published. Holy Hannah. What do I love about this cover?

Everything. That slab of solid black is an attention-grabber, of course. But it's also the black of death and of mourning. Westlake died on the last day of 2008. With his name centered near the top and the word memory directly below, the cover effectively becomes a cenotaph, the title perhaps short for In memory of.

It's the black of noir fiction, naturally. The shadows that loom over the characters, and in which they are lost. Sin. Night. Blindness. Despair. Above all the existential blank against which the noir story is set, where God is absent and Fate is an amalgam of character and perversely bad luck.

And specific to this novel is the black of broken memory. On page one actor Paul Cole is caught in flagrante by an enraged husband, who grabs a chair, lifts it over his head and... It is the last thing Cole remembers seeing before he wakes in a hospital with gaping holes in his existing memories and his ability to form and hold new ones damaged.

That's a lot of heavy lifting for 30 square inches of glossy paper!

The only downside to the cover design is that the figures are, necessarily, reduced to postage stamp size. Hopefully Orbik will post a good scan of the original art on his site soon. I wrote to him, asking about the initial inspiration for the cover. He graciously took the time to reply (Thank you, sir!) and says:

The concept was Hard Case Crime's from the beginning. They said they wanted something which felt "like this is some sort of existentialist drama we're seeing play out" of the scene from the very beginning of the book. A bare-stage set-up (perhaps alluding to the actor in the story...?) --- something like a James Bama cover 40+ years back of fully rendered mini-figures on a solid black background.

So bravo to Hard Case for concept and to Orbik for execution. Buy their books! Look for his glossy yet gritty art! Do it!

While I'm at it I can't help giving a quick nod to another Hard Case title featuring Orbik. Once again Sarah Weinman has the story on how this one came about. I'll just say that anyone who would publish a Sherlock Holmes novel with this beautiful and deliriously inappropriate cover and the tagline "They All Answered to... The BODYMASTER!" does not lack for chutzpah or a sense of humor. And yes the book does include a character with that rather evocative title. In some fraternal organizations and secret societies the chief officer of a lodge was (and presumably is, though it's hard to imagine anyone saying it with a straight face now) the Body Master. In Doyle's novel Black Jack McGinty is a Bodymaster in the Eminent Order of Freemen, a (fictional) mutual aid society among Irish immigrants working the Pennsylvania coal mines circa 1870. Valley is very loosely based on real events, or alleged events anyway. The Wikipedia page has an excellent plot summary which also touches upon the novel's connection to the Molly Maguires, but if you are curious about the "Mollies" be warned: their story is a quagmire of controversy, ideology and partisan bullshit, and no matter what version of events you decide is most likely, it sure won't give you that "proud to be an American" feeling. Caveat Lector.

Recently read: The Sword of Rhiannon

I'm not sure this tale has ever had a cover worthy of it. The recent edition under the Planet Stories imprint probably comes closest, with fiery art by Daren Bader, who has a blog and is selling a book.

I digress for a minor quibble. Crediting Leigh Brackett as the "author" of The Empire Strikes Back is... interesting. By which I mean not strictly true. No movie ever had a single "author" because film is an inescapably collaborative art. Brackett is credited (along with Lawrence Kasdan) with writing the screenplay of Empire, based on a story by George Lucas, but (1) a screenplay is not a movie, and (2) writing credits are subject to negotiation and arbitration and don't necessarily reflect the real origin of what ends up on screen. But "Credited co-writer of the screenplay of" doesn't roll trippingly off the tongue, and the lawyers must have decided it would fly as is. Cool with me. Whatever. I'm just saying, is all.

The Ace paperback I own is undated, as far as I can tell. The $1.25 price and the "lowercase a" logo place it in the early 70s. The cover art is uncredited (of course) and it's not ringing any bells at the moment. The cloaked figure is supposed to be a humanoid lizard, but his pointy snout makes him look like a green poodle. He also has a rather forlorn air (for a poodle), whereas Brackett makes her serpent-like "Dhuvians" very effective figures of revulsion and primal fear. Fifi stands amidst a cracked and barren landscape that evokes the somber desert Mars of the story's beginning rather than the lush, vibrant Mars-of-a-million-years-ago where the real action takes place. The symbol rather arbitrarily placed on the figure's cloak is a misinterpretation (I believe) of an image on the eponymous sword:

The corridor ended in a vast chamber. ... There was a dais at one end with an altar of marble, upon which was carved the same symbol that appeared on the hilt of the sword - the ouroboros in the shape of a winged serpent. But the circle was broken, the head of the serpent lifted as though looking into some new infinity.

The symbol's significance is pretty clear by the book's end, though to her credit Brackett never beats you over the head with it.

The vast chamber described above is the antechamber of (dum-dum-DUM!) the Tomb of Rhiannon, called the Cursed One, a rebel godling of Martian legend. His rest (or imprisonment) has been disturbed by Penkawr, a rat-like native thief who can be thrown considerably further than he can be trusted, and Matt Carse, an Earth-born archaeologist who has gone native and joined the "aristocracy of thieves" of the Low Canal towns of Mars. Carse is a bit like Indiana Jones by way of the Gray Mouser, or Conan with a PhD and a proton-gun.

Forget Penkawr, who disappears after his inevitable act of betrayal, and doesn't even rate the eventual comeuppance usually due his kind. Carse emerges from Rhiannon's tomb a million years before he entered it, wanders in a daze down to the now-living city nearby, is promptly arrested as a spy and, sans trial, condemned to a short miserable life chained to an oar in the war-galley of Lady Ywain of Sark, whose father plots to rule all of Mars.

Our hero is now the lowest of the low. Of course by story's end he will hold the fate of a planet in his hands. There's a great deal of swashbuckling adventure in between (the novel was originally titled The Sea-Kings of Mars); Carse finds companions, allies, enemies, etc. in various city-states and among several races (sky-people, sea-people, lizard-people and just plain people-people) He learns the nature of Rhiannon's sin, and discovers to his horror that he carried a lot more than that sword out of Rhiannon's tomb.

It has literally been decades since I've read any Edgar Rice Burroughs. Nevertheless I do not hesitate to rate Brackett higher than her model and inspiration in at least one area - psychological realism. When Carse steps out of the tomb to find himself in Mars' distant past his first reaction is shock, then denial.

Carse's numbed gaze swept along the great coast of the distant shoreline. And down on that far sunlit coast he saw the glitter of a white city and knew that it was Jekkara.

Jekkara, bright and strong between the verdant hills and the mighty ocean, that ocean that had not been seen upon Mars for nearly a million years.

Matthew Carse knew then that it was no mirage. He sat and hid his face in his hands. His body was shaken by deep tremors and his nails bit into his own flesh until blood trickled down his cheeks.
...
Blindly, still gripping the jewelled sword, he leaped up and turned to re-enter the buried Tomb of Rhiannon.
...
He stopped, a convulsive shudder running through his frame. He could not make himself face again that bubble of glittering gloom, that dreadful plunge through interdimensional infinity.

Impossible to imagine John Carter or David Innes reacting so violently to anything. The typical Burroughs protagonist possesses a few simple, exemplary traits - honor, courage, loyalty - and precious little else. Nothing that would get in the way of that most basic form of reader identification: I wish such adventures would happen to me; I wish I were equal to such adventures.

And there's a lot to be said for that. But there's also a lot to be said for this:

Between his feet Carse saw dimly the red streams that trickled down into the bilges and stained the water. The rage that had burned in him chilled and altered as iron tempers under the hammer.

At last they stopped. Carse raised his head. It was the greatest effort he had ever made, but stiffly, stubbornly, he raised it. He looked directly at Ywain.

"Have you learned your lesson, slave?" she asked.

It was a long time before he could form the words to answer. He was beyond caring now whether he lived or died. His whole universe was centered on the woman who stood arrogant and untouchable above him.

"Come down yourself and teach me if you can," he answered hoarsely and called her a name in the lowest vernacular of the streets - a name that said there was nothing she could teach a man.

For a moment no one moved or spoke. Carse saw her face go white and he laughed, a hoarse terrible sound in the silence. Then Scyld drew his sword and vaulted over the rail into the oar pit.

The blade flashed high and bright in the torchlight. It occurred to Carse that he had traveled a long way to die...