Tim and Nick Have a Library

The Moorcock Project: The Dragon in the Sword: 1

2010-08-26T02:00:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-16T00:29:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-13T11:30:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-08-03T16:00:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-27T00:27:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-30T11:14:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-30T00:20:00.000-07:00

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...

Bought: The Dead Beat

2009-08-14T21:39:00.000-07:00

Robert Bloch wrote a novel called The Dead Beat. I once owned a copy, sold during the early years of my marriage when it seemed we would move from apartment to apartment forever and my books would never come out of boxes. This ain't that. This book is subtitled Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries. The author, Marilyn Johnson, has toiled in the magazine field as editor and writer of obits (among, I presume, other things). This appears to be her first book and I like to imagine that, made sensitive to the Reaper's presence, she is trying to escape from that swiftly thinning field before the whole moribund industry falls to his scythe. Her flight is less than assured because: a) leaping from periodicals to books may be like escaping the Titanic via rope ladder only to find yourself on board the Hindenburg; and b) I found this book on the bargain shelves, remaindered.

The Dead Beat's bibliography includes The Last Word, edited by Marvin Siegel, a wonderful collection of obits from the New York Times which, come to think of it, I found remaindered. The Last Word eschews celebrity deaths, focusing instead on eccentrics, local heroes, inventors and the like. It's a paradoxically uplifting book and a steal at any price.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 13

2009-08-08T20:48:00.000-07:00

The Swords of Heaven, the Flowers of Hell

Let's start with the cover this time. Heavy Metal Presents? Howard Chaykin? You know what that means...

Boobies!

Full frontal nudity, in fact. But only the girls of course. We're not perverts or anything. There's some salty language too, which I actually found rather off-putting. The default language of fantasy, whether high, heroic, urban or science, remains discreet, if not utterly chaste.

According to his introduction, Moorcock gave Chaykin a detailed outline and then left him alone. I can't help wondering if the outline specified that little valentine on our hero's chest. I confess it makes it hard for me to take him seriously. The top-knot, which you can't really see here, doesn't help either. These things are a matter of taste, of course, and a lot of things that work in prose fail utterly when presented visually. A good illustrator makes it work or works around it or, often, just ignores it completely. Chaykin is in fact a very good illustrator. Maybe exposure to superhero comics warped his judgment. Compared to, say, Jack of Hearts our hero is dressed quite conservatively.

Flowers begins where Phoenix in Obsidian ended, with Urlik Skarsol (formerly Erekosë, formerly John Daker) alone on an endless plain of ice. Without further ado the Eternal Champion is drawn to his next Balancing Act...

"For my next trick (draws black blade) I will require a sacrifice from the audience."
*Drum-roll*
*Scream*
"Ta-Dah!"

...and finds himself in Hell. Seriously. That's what the barbaric natives call their desolate land. They identify the Champion as Clen of Clen Gar, Lord of the Dream Marches, which lie, it turns out, to the East, across a modest sea. East of the Marches, it turns out, lies a land called Heaven. Students of Moorcockology will get no extra credit for pointing out the obvious: that the balance represented by the messy, vulnerable Marches, not the extremes of Heaven or Hell, will turn out to be where it's at.

Erekosë and Urlik Skarsol were both Sleepers under the Hill, legendary heroes called from Death or something like it to aid their people in a time of crisis. It's never made entirely clear, but when Lord Clen returns to the Dream Marches he doesn't seem to have been missing for very long at all, perhaps a matter of months. Maybe for this very reason (if you need one) the Champion quickly acquires or recovers Lord Clen's memories, which saves a lot of time.

Briefly, Lord Clen finds out that the hordes of Hell are marching on Heaven with overwhelming force, and the Dream Marches, which form a kind of buffer zone, are their first target. Without aid the Marches are doomed, so he rides off to petition Heaven for help.

Lord Clen has a black blade but nothing much is made of it this time around. It doesn't get a name or a history. It writhes a little at one point but it never demands souls or blood or even Krispy Kreme.

Chaykin painted Flowers and I have to say I wish he had drawn it. The backgrounds are fantastic and he achieves some amazing effects. The problem I have is with the faces. Chaykin is great at drawing distinctive, expressive faces that reveal character, but I think this early painted work (his first?) lacks consistency in that regard.

But that's a quibble. His lay-outs are dynamic and varied and he makes great use of two-page spreads. In close-ups Lord Clen tends to look like the young Burt Lancaster, and Ermizhad -

Hold it, is that supposed to be Ermizhad? Ermizhad with her "elfin" features, high cheekbones and slanted, pupil-less eyes flecked with blue and gold? Ermizhad with her black hair? Oh well. Maybe the Champion's memories are getting a little scrambled.

Flowers is good enough to make me wish Moorcock had written a novella instead. However beautifully painted, this still feels like a sketch.

Oh yeah, in the introduction Moorcock reminisces about his early comics work. I can't resist passing on this sentence:

I also did a great deal of scripting for a weekly called Bible Story, which was one of the best-paying markets at the time, and was distinctive in that everyone who worked on it became, after a while, a thoroughgoing atheist.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 12

2009-08-07T21:42:00.000-07:00

To Rescue Tanelorn...

Oops. I broke my reading order.

Moorcock's bibliography is a nightmare. I catalog my books on LibraryThing, an ongoing experiment in wiki-style public book cataloging. There's a forum for those members who try to straighten out tangled bibliographies, clear up ambiguities, etc. I did a search for Moorcock's name and found that basically everyone who's ever looked at the problem has thrown their hands up in despair and walked away.

For instance. The Eternal Champion is a novel as well as the second book in the UK omnibus series and the first book in the US series. The UK omnibus includes The Eternal Champion, Phoenix in Obsidian and The Dragon in the Sword. The US omnibus omits Dragon but includes The Sundered Worlds and To Rescue Tanelorn...

For another instance. Stormbringer is a novel as well as the twelfth UK omnibus, whose contents are identical to the eleventh US omnibus which is entitled Elric: The Stealer of Souls, which is also the title of the first volume of a new series of Elric collections with different contents altogether!

My head hurts. Anyway, the suggested reading order I'm using is an amalgam of the UK and US omnibuses mixed in with some other stuff. The list zigged, I zagged, and I read Tanelorn about forty books early. Mea culpa.

The cover. One thing about DAW: unlike a lot of publishers they were always conscientious about crediting their cover artists. Not that Michael Whelan needs it. There's his stylized badge/emblem/signature thingy carved into the top step. Note also the elegant framing and composition. Dig those baubles. No one baubled like Whelan back in the day.

And is that a near-subliminal face on the chest of the Lich King? Is that from the book? I don't remember.

I also don't remember this story, though I know I read the Elric books in my teens. Maybe I skipped it because Elric wasn't in it. That sounds like me.

It's a graceful little story and I don't think I'm really spoiling anything if I tell you the entire plot.

City is threatened.
Hero goes on quest for supernatural aid.
Hero returns with aid just in time to save city.

Well, duh! That's like spoiling Titanic by telling you the ship sinks.

Since we know where we're going the journey is everything. Here's how it starts.

Beyond the tall and ominous glass-green forest of Troos, well to the North and unheard of in Bakshaan, Elwher or any other city of the Young Kingdoms, on the shifting shores of the Sighing Desert lay Tanelorn, a lonely, long-ago city, loved by those it sheltered. Tanelorn had a peculiar nature in that it welcomed and held the wanderer. To its peaceful streets and low houses came the gaunt, the savage, the brutalized, the tormented, and in Tanelorn they found rest.
Now, most of these troubled travellers who dwelt in peaceful Tanelorn had thrown off earlier allegiances to the Lords of Chaos who, as gods, took more than a mild interest in the affairs of men. It happened, therefore, that these same Lords grew to resent the unlikely city of Tanelorn and, not for the first time, decided to act against it.

An unlikely army is raised against the unlikely city and Rackhir the Red Archer sets off for help. He acquires a companion, travels through five Gates and across five mystical realms, encounters an old flame (now an enemy), recruits allies against Chaos, and returns in the very nick. All in less than 10,000 words, another example of Moorcock's profligacy of imagination.

When it's all over Rackhir must deal with that old girlfriend, Sorana, who stood with Chaos against his beloved Tanelorn. His solution proves that he is entirely worthy of the peace he desires.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 11

2009-08-06T22:23:00.000-07:00

Phoenix in Obsidian

I'm glad I read The Eternal Champion and The Sundered Worlds but I can't really see myself going back to them. Phoenix in Obsidian is a different story (so to speak) - smart, atmospheric, fast-moving science fantasy. Not as ambitious or assured as Moorcock's later work, but absolutely nothing to sneeze at or be ashamed of.

John Daker/Erekosë has had a hundred years of peace, but the multiverse keeps turning, and it starts to look like time for the Eternal Cowboy to ride off into the sunset. Sure enough, Daker is soon the wonderfully named Urlik Skarsol, another legendary warrior called to aid humanity in its darkest hour.

The setting is a distinctly old-fashioned Dying Earth venue. The sun grows cold. The Earth no longer turns, and her fires have long gone out. Ice has conquered the world. The vestiges of humanity live in sea caves along a narrow strip of coastline sheltered by an enormous mountain range.

This book is a great example of Moorcock's talent for bizarre but convincing landscapes, technologies and cultures. His imagination appears to be limitless, and his worlds are filled with odd little details and grace notes that have a preternatural rightness to them. Example: the sea of this exhausted world is so saturated with salt and who knows what else that it has become viscous, so that ships must glide on the water's surface via hydrofoil, and men who fall overboard sink slowly but inexorably as if in icy quicksand. The science may not make any sense (I couldn't say) but the point is the image - a frozen, tideless, poisonous, syrupy sea lying black beneath grey sky and shrunken, ghostly sun.

Erekosë had Kanajana, a poisonous sword only he could safely handle. Urlik is called upon to wield the generically-named but infinitely more frightening Black Sword, a fate he resists without quite knowing why. Anyone familiar with Elric's sword Stormbringer can guess that this Black Sword will be, at best, a mixed blessing.

Daker/Erekosë/Urlik again finds himself allied with humanity against an unhuman foe, the Silver Warriors of the book's alternate title. I'm happy to say that the Champion avoids genocide this time around, but nevertheless those that call him discover that, while they may use him, they are in turn used by Fate, which has plans of its own and exacts a price they may not wish to pay.

The cover. I read the omnibus version, and I own the Dell paperback with the magnificent but over-familiar Frazetta cover. The UK paperbacks have featured beautiful and striking artwork, but I decided this very classy and unusual Robert Gould cover captures the tone of the book best. Note that the cup and sword are here again. The cover vaguely suggests an illuminated manuscript, thanks to the prominent block of text (an ominous bit of verse from the novel). Text as a major decorative element is an Arts and Crafts touch. The colors are my favorite part (what I wouldn't give for a good-sized print of this cover!) - white for the ice, grey for the sky, black for the sea, and red for fire - and blood. Large quantities of blood.

Bought: a Buttload of Tubb

2009-08-05T23:49:00.000-07:00

On a whim I loaded Timothy in the Odyssey tonight and drove down to Half Price Books in Tacoma. Memory is notoriously unreliable in these matters, but it seems to me that whenever I get these sudden urges to go to HPB I am always rewarded. Tonight I was rewarded in spades.

We have a rule around here that you can go just about anywhere anytime if you're willing to take a boy with you. Timothy was disappointed we weren't going to the Borders down the street (they have an elevator) but he handled it well. We found a Pixar-themed magnetic drawing pad that kept him occupied while I browsed. I was looking for reasonably priced Moorcock omnibuses. No luck. But check it out...

Someone brought in their entire Dumarest of Terra collection, most of them in fine condition, all of them priced at two dollars. I picked out twelve of the nicer ones, all DAWs. It turns out two of them are duplicates and will be donated to the public library.

I'll probably never read these, but there's a good chance someday Timothy or Nicholas will. In the meantime there are the distinctive yellow spines, author's name in red, title in black, stylized DAW = sf logo at the top. And the covers: I recognize George Barr and Ken Kelly, and there are two by Don Maitz, an old favorite. Thanks to Terran_Trader for uploading more than a thousand cover images to Amazon, including all but one of the above.

The Dumarest books would have made the trip worth it, but there were two more rare DAWs - The Witling by Vernor Vinge and The Other Log of Phileas Fogg by Phil Farmer - and finally a beautiful copy of the Dell 1979 Slaves of Sleep by L. Ron Hubbard with gorgeous San Julian cover, Edd Cartier illustrations and, yes, fold-out ad for the SFBC in the middle (4 books for a dime with membership, sucker).

Now I just have to explain to my wife that I didn't spend thirty dollars, I saved at least that much. Wish me luck.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 9

2009-08-04T22:49:00.000-07:00

The Sundered Worlds

This cosmological romance is divided into two roughly equal parts, originally published separately. All the mind-bending revelations and universe-shattering events take place at the end of part one, which gives part two a distinct air of anticlimax. Once you've destroyed one universe and revealed the cosmic destiny of mankind, what do you do for an encore?

In part one Renark von Bek, with two friends and a chance companion, explores the Shifter, an anomalous planetary system which drifts at right angles to the multiverse, appearing for hours or days in any given plane before moving on to the next. Renark has gotten some Very Bad News about the fate of the universe and hopes to find a solution. The Shifter is a chaotic environment in which the laws of physics are in constant flux, driving men mad. Much is made of Renark holding self and psyche together through sheer will.

Renark and friend Asquiol form an unmistakable Eternal Champion/Loyal Companion pairing. Uniquely among Companions, Asquiol will graduate to E.C. status in part two, after Renark meets his ultimate fate.

The system is explored. Clues lead from one planet to the next. Cosmic secrets are revealed. There is much Capitalization. Here's a good example.

"It was believed," said the metazoa, "that those whom we call the Doomed Folk had passed away in a distant galaxy in our original universe, and that galaxy - which had known great strife - was quiet again in readiness for the Great Turn which would be the beginning of a new cycle in its long life. We and other watchers in nearby galaxies saw it shift like a smoky monster, saw it curl and writhe and its suns and planets pour in ordered patterns around the Hub and out around the Rim, reforming their ranks in preparation.
"The Dance of the Stars was a sight to destroy all but the noblest of watchers, for the weaving patterns depicted the Two Truths Which Bear the Third, so that while the galaxy reformed itself to begin a fresh cycle through its particular Time and Space, it also cleansed its sister galaxies of petty spirits and those who thought ignoble thoughts.
...
"When at last the Dance was over, the Hub began to spin, setting the pattern for the new Cycle. And slowly, from the Hub outwards to the Rim, the suns and planets began to turn again in a course that would be unchanged for eons."
...
"You witnessed a galaxy reorder itself by its own volition!" Renark sensed at last that his most important question was close to being answered.

I can't say much about part two without spoiling part one even further. It involves psychic combat, called the Blood Red Game, with an alien race. Two underused characters from part one reappear and are finally given something (but not much) to do.

Yes there's some clunky dialogue and awkward exposition, and it really works better if you think of it as two linked stories rather than a novel. But so what? It's good pulpy cosmic fun.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 8

2009-08-03T23:28:00.000-07:00

The Sundered Worlds

What is this giddy, fast-paced space opera doing in the Eternal Champion omnibus, wedged between the first two John Daker/cliché is in place here. The last chance planet full of outlaws, gamblers and dreamers. The cosmic anomaly from which no one has ever returned. The hero with a psychic talent and a terrible secret.

The cover. I have a copy of the Mayflower paperback from the seventies (under the alternate title The Blood Red Game). I quite like it, but now that I've read some of the book itself I think this Paperback Library edition from the sixties is more appropriate. I suspect that 20 years ago I would have put this cover in the so-bad-it's-good category. Now it just looks good to me. No doubt my standards aren't what they used to be. I have no idea who painted it.

I didn't get much reading done today. My wife is off on Mondays and insists that we get out of the house, run errands, do things, have "fun", etc. Ugh. Tomorrow, God willing, I'll wrap this up and get a headstart on Phoenix in Obsidian.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 7

2009-08-02T17:31:00.000-07:00

The Eternal Champion

I knew from previous reading that the young Moorcock became a very good writer very quickly indeed, but I would almost swear that you can see him improve over the course of this single, quite brief novel. That's probably projection on my part, or else an artifact of the multiple revisions the work has undergone, including expansion from novella length.

The cover. I'm reading the US omnibus edition but... come on. Tom Canty or Frank Frazetta? That's a question? Not for me it ain't. Frazetta brings violent energy, flawless composition and sheer exuberance for the win. The Eternal Champion isn't doomed to pose for a series of pensive portraits - he's doomed to endless bloody combat! And seriously, that's the bass player from Duran Duran. Don't tell me it's not.

Fittingly, this cover features one of many Frazetta paintings that no longer exist in their original form. Like Moorcock, Frazetta has never hesitated to revise old works, often drastically and sometimes more than once. It's easy to forgive him, since those revisions are usually dramatic improvements, and often involve adding naked women or making the original women even nakeder. That last part, by the way, is rather unlike Moorcock, who has apparently had his consciousness raised quite a bit over the years on that front. That's no loss and all gain if the formidable Libussa from The City in the Autumn Stars is any example. Moorcock's women become sexier as they are objectified less.

John Daker of Earth is incarnated (or reincarnated) as

Moorcock doesn't do anything in Champion that he didn't do better elsewhere, but he did them here first. A good example is the "two races" idea. The conflict between Humanity and Eldren will be echoed by that of the Mabden and Vadagh in the Corum books as well as in the Young Kingdoms that threaten Elric's Melniboné.

Stop reading now to avoid a big spoiler. The nicest thing I can say about The Eternal Champion is that it's surprisingly readable. Weak, I know. Sorry. The most damning criticism I can think of is that it features the genocide of one race and the near-genocide of another but lacks the thematic clarity and moral seriousness that would give those events anything like the impact they should possess. It's been a very long time now since anything Moorcock wrote could be criticised for those particular failings. It's kind of nice to know that the Master was once a journeyman.

Tomorrow, The Sundered Worlds.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 6

2009-08-01T09:39:00.000-07:00

The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius

The suggested reading order I'm using is built around the Eternal Champion omnibus editions of the mid-nineties, which explains what this single short story is doing wedged between novels. Moorcock made revisions (most of them very minor, I'm led to believe) to many of his works to bring them more firmly into the whole E.C./Multiverse uh, thing. The protagonist of this strange detective story was renamed von Bek and the story was included in the US and UK versions of the von Bek omnibus. Why this particular story? No idea, unless it's simply a matter of the setting, Berlin. Recently Moorcock revised this story yet again for inclusion in The Metatemporal Detective which, frankly, makes more sense. The narrator refers to himself as a metatemporal investigator right up front.

My copy of the von Bek omnibus is, I am assured, in the mail, so I read the version from The Time Dweller.

It's hard to say anything about a fifteen page story without spoiling it somewhat. Let's see...

Things that Pleasure Garden reminded me of, mostly for quite superficial reasons:

Hitler Painted Roses - Harlan Ellison

How I Lost the Second World War and Helped Turn Back the German Invasion - Gene Wolfe

Death and the Compass - Jorge Luis Borges

The Long Goodbye (1973) - directed by Robert Altman; screenplay by Leigh Brackett

The Digging Leviathan - James P. Blaylock

The narrator on his method:

Don't ask me the location or the date. I never bother to find out things like that, they only confuse me. With me it's instinct, win or lose.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 5

2009-07-31T20:41:00.000-07:00

The City in the Autumn Stars

Did I call this book a romp? Oh God. It certainly starts out that way. But oh God.

Spoilerish territory ahead. Nothing too specific, but if all you want to be told is "Great book, you should read it!" then you've been told: it is and you should. Just get ready to be put through the wringer.

Von Bek pursues the mysterious Libussa, Duchess of Crete, across Europe. He comes to rest in Mirenburg, an idealized city largely based on Prague: cosmopolitan, tolerant, prosperous, and at peace. There he finds friends and enemies old and new. A multitude of alchemical cultists converge on the city in anticipation of some imminent celestial conjunction. Von Bek's love for Libussa, a woman he barely knows, grows obsessive, while his dreams become bloody visions in which he is both Theseus and Ariadne, threatened by a bloody Beast that might be Minotaur or Kronos, monster or dark god. He becomes involved, much against his nature, in an elaborate scam, which further jeopardizes his already precarious mental equilibrium.

Up to this point, midway through the book, no overtly supernatural event has occurred. One character claims to be deathless, and to have known von Bek's distant ancestor Ulrich, but has shown no proof. Von Bek's dreams might simply be bad dreams, and Moorcock might be writing a naturalistic novel that explores belief in the supernatural and the exploitation of that belief, or one in which apparently supernatural elements will have mundane explanations (the Uncanny mode, per Todorov) or in which tension between natural and supernatural explanations is uneasily maintained (the Fantastic). Von Bek might turn out to be an unreliable narrator, whether deliberate fabulator, innocent madman or something in between.

Big spoiler: Moorcock didn't write any of those books. I mentioned symmetry in my earlier post. Exactly halfway through The City in the Autumn Stars von Bek and company go through the looking glass, from Mirenburg to the eponymous City. And that's when things get both seriously weird - and as serious as a heart attack.

City begins to spiral in on itself, becoming more and more intense and surreal. Von Bek enters a physical labyrinth which mirrors the tortuous maze of his own emotional, ethical and intellectual conflicts. The climax is hallucinatory, harrowing, and ultimately ambiguous; both deliriously romantic and utterly horrific.

City is in at least one sense a more mature novel than The War Hound and the World's Pain. Ulrich von Bek's love Sabrina was a convincingly real character but with an entirely passive role: she waited patiently on the sidelines while von Bek and various other men determined the world's fate. I have written almost nothing about Manfred's love Libussa not because she does nothing but because she does everything. Her character and her decisions are the engine that drives the book. She is a Player, and discovering her is a pleasure I dare not spoil.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 3

2009-07-29T01:30:00.000-07:00

The City in the Autumn Stars

According to the blurbery on the back cover City is the "long-awaited sequel" to The War Hound and the World's Pain, but if anyone came to this "sequel" looking for more of the same they were quickly disillusioned. War Hound and City are both narrated by a von Bek (Ulrich, Manfred) and begin in something very like hell on earth (Germany during the Thirty Years War, Paris during the Terror) but the similarities seem to end there. Ulrich von Bek is a wary, weary, cynical mercenary. Manfred is a gregarious dandy with a reputation as a Casanova; an idealist who fought in the American Revolution and whose disillusionment with the new French Republic has just become complete as the novel begins. War Hound is a somber fable, a hopeless quest through an apocalyptic landscape blighted by war and disease. So far City is a romp: fast-paced, romantic and often very funny. In chapter one our hero flees Paris, where he has become persona non grata, pursued by a vindictive agent of the Republic. In chapter two he falls in love with the mysterious Libussa, Duchess of Crete, who promptly disappears. In chapter three he befriends a roguish Scot ballonnier looking for suckers to invest in Aerial Expeditions into those Unknown Lands where Rubies the size of Canteloupes litter the ground. And so on.

The cover. For a while Robert Gould was the Moorcock artist in the U.S., and his stuff is very beautiful, although I don't think this particular image is a good choice for a mass market paperback. A detail from it might have worked better at this size. The Arts and Crafts typeface goes with Gould's stuff like chocolate with peanut butter, and evokes the alchemical mysticism with which Reason's apostle von Bek will be confronted. The image is a rendering of an ikon encountered about halfway through the book, so it might be examined for clues: note that the youth on the left bears a cup, a feminine symbol, while the woman on the right holds a sword. A figure of somewhat obscure gender stands between them, holding both.

Symmetries, role reversal, gender confusion, the union of opposites. Yup, all here.

More tomorrow.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 2

2009-07-28T23:56:00.000-07:00

The War Hound and the World's Pain

It's been unbearably hot here. Tomorrow (I mean today, *sigh*) there's a good chance that Seattle will set a new high temperature record. Not for a particular date - the highest temperature ever recorded here. The heat interferes with our lives in various ways. My reading hasn't been affected much. My blogging has, since our tiny portable AC unit is set up in the family room and my computer is in a craft room where temperatures have hovered around 90F the last few days. If I get an early start tomorrow maybe I can catch up before it becomes unbearable.

A contemporary reviewer (possibly Baird Searles in IASFM) pointed out that War Hound is a fable, a short tale with a moral lesson which is more-or-less explicitly spelled out. While it doesn't end with a pithy "Leave well enough alone," or "One good turn deserves another," it is almost that obvious. War Hound is also a metafiction, insofar as it is a fantasy about fantasy. Here are two snippets of dialogue between von Bek and an unusual hermit named Philander Groot.

"And do you understand the nature of the Mittelmarch?" I asked him.
He shrugged. "I do not. All I know is that Mittelmarch could not survive without the rest of the world - but the rest of the world can survive without Mittelmarch. And that, I suspect, is what its denizens fear in you, if they fear anything at all."

...

"Everything that is fantastic leagues against me," I said, repeating Klosterheim's warning.
"Aye. Everything that is fantastic is threatened. Some believe all these marvels you have witnessed to be productions of the World's Pain. Without the Pain, some say, they would not be necessary. They would not exist."
"You suggest that mankind's needs create them?"
"Man is a rationalising beast, if not a rational one," said Philander Groot.

Is there a name for the part of a fantasy novel where the author hits the fast forward button? After meticulously describing progress from Peasantville to Wizardtown to Elfwood the author realizes his characters are only a quarter of the way to Climaxburg, and suddenly our narrator is saying "We continued East in this way for some months. In the Subplot Mountains we were set upon by brigands, who shot my favorite llama. We rested for a while in the Kingdom of Reluctant Allies, where I bedded the Queen. Or a queen, anyway."

At about the 3/4 point, Moorcock hits the fast forward button just briefly. Von Bek has been joined in his quest by Sedenko, a Muscovite soldier of fortune who shares the almost universal antisemitism of his time, and we get this wonderful paragraph:

Beyond Crema we passed again into the Mittelmarch. Save that the seasons were, of course, reversed, the landscape was not greatly different. We were in a kingdom, we discovered, which was the vestige of a Carthaginian Empire which had beaten Rome during Hannibal's famous campaign, conquered all of Europe and parts of Asia and had converted to the Jewish religion, so that the whole world had been ruled by Rabbinical Knights. It was a land so horrifying to Sendenko that he believed he was being punished for his sins and was already in Hell. We were treated hospitably and my engineering experience was called into play when the Chief Judge of this Carthaginian land pronounced a sentence of death upon a Titan. A gallows had to be built for him. In return for aid and some extra gold, I was able to design a suitable scaffold. The Titan was hanged and I received the gratitude of those people forever.

Believe it or not, that's Moorcock's idea of a throwaway. Another writer would milk that idea for a novel, if not a trilogy. To Moorcock it's a bit of color tossed in near the home stretch of a singleton. Your typical fantasy author would turn War Hound's plot into the framework for an interminable series of overplotted doorstops. Moorcock chronicles the End of the World as We Knew It in 208 pages of flawlessly paced adventure fiction and every incident, every word is there in service of his theme. Note to self: Moorcock is a mensch.

It's strange to start this project with this particular book, because it has such a strong goodbye-to-all-that vibe. If Moorcock had gone mainstream after its publication, eschewing swords and sorcery for more literary output, no one would have been surprised, and War Hound would be seen now as both summa and apologia from a man ready to put away childish things.

Thank God that didn't happen.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 1

2009-07-27T00:26:00.000-07:00

The War Hound and the World's Pain

I'm a slow enough reader but when it comes to writing my pace is best described as glacial, so if I'm going to do this at all I'm afraid that composition, as such, will have to go out the window. Sorry.

This is a re-read for me. Besides the bare bones of the plot and its resolution the only thing I really remember after 25 years is the Mittelmarch, various supernatural realms scattered across Europe (and, presumably, the world), visible and accessible only to the damned.

Great cover by Rowena Morrill. The combination of angel's wings and devil's horns strikes a suitably ambiguous note. In the book Lucifer is actually without horns, wings or pants. I like how Rowena restricted her color palette, too. My only problem is that, for me, the shadow under Lucifer's nose keeps turning into a little Hitler mustache. Nobody wants that.

A short book that nonetheless takes its own sweet time getting started. The protagonist (hero?) begins his hopeless quest precisely one third of the way through the book. Don't get me wrong, the time is well spent.

This book has something in common with Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away, Dunsany's The Charwoman's Shadow, and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. This brief excerpt foreshadows that connection. Cynical mercenary Ulrich von Bek has fallen in love with the witch Sabrina. For the sake of her soul as well as his own he has accepted the charge of her master, the fallen angel Lucifer, to find the Cure for the World's Pain, sometimes called the Holy Grail. He prepares to depart.

I returned to draw back the curtains and sit on the edge of the bed, looking down on Sabrina's sleeping face. She started suddenly, crying out, reaching her hand to where I had lain. I touched her cheek. "I am here."
She turned and smiled at me. Then her eyes clouded. "You are leaving?"
"I suppose that I must. Soon."
"Yes," she said, "for it is morning." She began to sit up. She sighed. "When I made my bargain with Lucifer I thought that I was resisting circumstance, taking my fate into my own hands. But circumstance continues to affect us. Can it even affect who we are? Is there any proof beyond ourselves that we are unique?"
"We feel ourselves to be unique," I said. "But a cynic sees only familiarity and similarity and would say that we are all pretty much the same."
"Is it because a cynic does not possess the imagination to distinguish those subtle differences in which you and I believe?"
"I am a cynic," I said to her. "A cynic refuses to allow distinctions of motive or of temperament."
"Oh, but you are not!" She came into my arms. "Or you would not be here."
I held her closely. "I am what I have to be at this moment," I said. "For my own sake."
"And for mine," she reminded me.
I felt a terrible sadness well within me. I suppressed it. "And for yours," I agreed.
We kissed. The pain continued to grow. I pulled away from her. I went to the corner of the room and began to wash myself. I noticed that my hands were shaking and that my breathing had become unusually deep. I had a wish, at that moment, to return to Hell, to summon up an army of all those poor damned souls and set them in rebellion against Lucifer, as Lucifer had set Himself against God. I felt that we were in the hands of foolish, insane beings, whose motives were more petty even than Man's. I wanted to be rid of all of them. It was unjust, I thought, that such creatures should have power over us. Even if they had created us, could they not, in turn, be destroyed?
But these ideas were pointless. I had neither the means, the knowledge nor the power to challenge them. I could only accept that my destiny was, in part at least, in their charge. I would have to agree to play out my role on Lucifer's terms, or play no role at all.

That gives you an idea of the tone of the book. If the characters aren't chasing or fighting each other, or witnessing some supernatural manifestation, they're talking about God, Fate, Chance, Will, Faith, Love, War... the Big Stuff.

More tomorrow. Oops, I mean later today.

"I go out bloggin', after midnight, out in the moonlight..."

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 0

2009-07-25T13:08:00.000-07:00

I had all but forgotten this blog existed. Maybe a Big Project will inspire me to keep at it this time.

The Big Project is this: read more or less the entirety of Michael Moorcock's oeuvre (hey, got it right the first try!) in one year. Since I've been averaging a book a month for decades now, this represents a colossal opportunity for me to fall on my face. My only consolation is that it seems likely no one will ever know.

This thread from a forum at Moorcock's Miscellany includes a recommended reading order. I intend to follow this plan closely, with one big deviation. The list's author uses Moorcock's Eternal Champion/Multiverse conceit as his organizing principle, and rightly so. Everything that doesn't clearly fit within that framework is lumped together at the end of the list. For the sake of balance and variety I plan to shuffle this material back into the deck, so to speak.

What, this thing is still here?

2009-07-23T15:58:00.000-07:00

I mean seriously, doesn't anything ever get deleted anymore?

Oh well...

REBOOT!

Bought: The Good German

2008-09-18T21:11:00.000-07:00

Oh the insufferable snobbery of the fanboy. I can remember when I wouldn't have a movie tie-in cover on my shelves. Most egregious instance? For years the only available copy of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was the Blade Runner tie. At the height of my PKD-mania I couldn't read that key novel because I hadn't found an untainted edition. (I still haven't.) Eventually I got over my distaste and bought the damn thing (retail!), and felt a little silly about the years I had held out.
Like a lot of lifelong readers (I suppose) I resent the way movies dominate our culture. More, I hate how they consume our culture, voraciously swallowing up books, comics, old TV shows, the life stories of the famous and the heart warming triumphs of the obscure - anything to keep the film rolling. And afterward all of it, whether real event or artful fiction, is forever a kind of shadowy appendage of the movie, at least to the majority of people.

I remember seeing Kanon's earlier books in stores, but I missed this one somehow. I've only seen a few clips from the movie. It, like the poster/cover seen here, is pastiche, meant to resemble something the studio (Warner Brothers) might have made sixty years ago. Steven Soderbergh is a great director, and something of a chameleon, so I'll have to catch the whole thing one of these days to see just how far he ran with it. In the meantime I wonder what Kanon thinks of the whole thing. Based on what little I've seen, I can't help feeling that shooting in black and white was a very good idea - but trying to emulate Warner's midcentury style may have been a very bad one.

I used the word pastiche above, but of course the poster is more than that. It's an outright lift. A shameless, didn't even bother to file the serial numbers off, bare-faced, brilliant steal, and the reason the book caught my eye in the first place.
The setting (Berlin, immediately post-war) and the protagonist (an American correspondent who lived in the city before the war, now returned) are almost irresistable, given my recent reading. And it certainly got enough praise from the critics. We'll see. In the meantime, I'm not going to pick an excerpt out of a book I haven't even read, so here's a zinger from Ugarte, as played by Peter Lorre:

"You know, Rick, I have many friends in Casablanca, but somehow, just because you despise me, you are the only one I trust."

Old Friends: Shadow Land

2008-09-18T00:04:00.000-07:00

Straub may be my favorite living author. Shadow Land isn't his best novel (I might nominate Koko) but it is my favorite, the one that echoes inside me. This excerpt requires no setup, and gives an idea of the tone.

"Imagine a bird," the magician said. "Just now - flapping up, frightened, indeed tormented by fear, up out of this hat."
He twitched the white scarf away from the tall silk hat, and a dove the shade of the scarf beat its wings on the brim and awkwardly fell to the table - a terrified, panicked bird, unable to fly, making a loud clatter of wings on the polished table.
"Pretty bird," said the magician, and smiled at the two boys. "Now imagine a cat."
He whisked his scarf once again over the hat, and a white cat slipped over the brim. It came up out of the hat like a snake, flattening itself down onto the table, looking at nothing but the dove. With a slow predatory crawl, the cat went toward the dove.
The magician, who was dressed as a sinister clown in white-face and red wig above black tails, grinned at the boys and abruptly sprang over and backward, landing on his gloved hands. He held himself rigidly still for a second and then folded his legs down and his trunk up in what looked like one flawless motion. Now he was standing where he had been, and he dropped the white scarf over the elongated form of the cat.
When the magician passed his hand into the scarf, it fluttered down onto the flat surface of the table.
Three inches away, the dove still worked its wings and made its terrible clattering noise of panic.
"And that's it, isn't it?" the magician said. "Cat and bird. Bird and cat." He was still grinning. "And since our little friend is still so frightened, perhaps we'd better make her disappear too." He snapped his fingers, twitched the scarf, and the bird was gone.
"Cats remind me of a true story," he said to the mesmerized boys, speaking as if he were merely yarning, as if nothing but entertainment was on his mind. "It's an old story, but the truest stories are very often the oldest ones. This was told by Sir Walter Scott to Washington Irving, and by Monk Lewis to the poet Shelley - and to me by a friend of mine who actually saw it happen.
"A traveler, in other words my friend, was journeying on foot to the house of a companion - not me - where he was going to spend the night. He had been walking all day, and even though it was already late and night was coming on, he was tired enough to rest his feet when he came to a ruined abbey. He sat down, took off his boots, leaned against an iron fence, and began to rub his feet. An odd series of noises made him turn around and peer through the bars of the fence.
"Down below him, on the grassy floor of the old abbey, he saw a procession of cats. They were formed into two long equal lines, and were marching forward very slowly. Now, of course, he had never seen anything like that before, and he bent forward to look more closely. It was then that he saw that the cats at the head of the procession were carrying a little coffin on their backs, and were making for, were slowly approaching, a small open grave. When my friend had seen the grave, he looked horrified back at the coffin borne by the lead cats, and noticed that on it sat a crown. As he watched, the lead cats began to lower the coffin into the grave.
"After that he was so frightened that he could not stay in that place a moment longer, and he thrust his feet into his boots and rushed on to the house of his friend. During dinner, he found that he could not keep from telling his friend what he had witnessed.
"He had scarcely finished when his friend's cat, which had been dozing in front of the fire, leaped up and cried, 'Then I am the King of the Cats!' and disappeared in a flash up the chimney. It happened, my friends - yes, it happened, my charming little birds."

A word of warning: if you decide to read Shadow Land you will meet the Collector, and the Collector will mess you up.

Bought: Fanny Hill

2008-09-14T20:13:00.000-07:00

While searching for the Book Hut in Ocean Shores I found a sale on behalf of the local library in a nondescript building on the main drag. A rather intense roundtable about city politics was in progress, and continued throughout my visit, continually refreshed by new arrivals as the original participants went their various ways. I'm not as good at tuning that kind of thing out as I used to be, so I scanned the shelves as fast as I could. A stack of books on stage magic yielded an oversized Martin Gardner I had never heard of, and a shelf marked "classics" included two examples of literary smut. I paid my $2.something and escaped into the gray afternoon.
If quizzed (which never happens in real life) I could have told you the title of Cleland's book given the subtitle, or remembered the subtitle if given the title, but otherwise my ignorance was complete. I had a vague notion it dated to the early 20th century (in fact it predates the United States by a generation), and in complete contradiction to this I also confused it with Moll Flanders, which is at least in the correct century.
Having browsed through the introductory material to correct my ignorance, I opened the book at random in search of smut. Just how naughty are Fanny Hill's naughty bits? Very naughty indeed. It's strange (and good dirty fun) to read a text that is entirely explicit but also free of both the vulgar and the clinical names of the various bits and acts. Warning: the following excerpt becomes more naughty as it proceeds.

I bid him come towards me and give me his letter, at the same time throwing down, carelessly, a book I had in my hands. He colour'd, and came within reach of delivering me the letter, which he held out, awkwardly enough, for me to take, with his eyes riveted on my bosom, which was, through the design'd disorder of my handkerchief, sufficiently bare, and rather shaded than hid.
I, smiling in his face, took the letter, and immediately catching gently hold of his shirt sleeve, drew him towards me, blushing, and almost trembling; for surely his extreme bashfulness, and the utter inexperience, call'd for, at least, all the advances to encourage him: his body was now conveniently inclin'd towards me, and just softly chucking his smooth beardless chin, I asked him if he was afraid of a lady? . . . , and with that took, and carrying his hand to my breasts, I prest it tenderly to them. They were now finely furnish'd, and rais'd in flesh, so that, panting with desire, they rose and fell, in quick heaves, under his touch: at this, the boy's eyes began to lighten with all the fires of inflam'd nature, and his cheeks flush'd with a deep scarlet: tongue-tied with joy, rapture, and bashfulness, he could not speak, but then his looks, his emotion, sufficiently satisfy'd me that my train had taken, and that I had no disappointment to fear.
My lips, which I threw in his way, so as that he could not escape kissing them, fix'd, fired, and embolden'd him: and now, glancing my eyes towards that part of his dress which cover'd the essential object of enjoyment, I plainly discover'd the swell and commotion there; and as I was now too far advanc'd to stop in so fair a way, and was indeed no longer able to contain myself, or wait the slower progress of his maiden bashfulness (for such it seem'd, and really was), I stole my hand upon his thighs, down one of which I could both see and feel a stiff hard body, confin'd by his breeches, that my fingers could discover no end to. Curious then, and eager to unfold so alarming a mystery, playing, as it were, with his buttons, which were bursting ripe from the active force within, those of his waistband and fore-flap flew open at a touch, when out it started; and now, disengag'd from the shirt, I saw, with wonder and surprise, what? not the play-thing of a boy, not the weapon of a man, but a maypole of so enormous a standard, that had proportions been observ'd, it must have belong'd to a young giant.

Naturally.

The maypole is described eloquently, and in great detail.

Naturally.

A thought, a question and a conclusion:

1. A book's worth can't be judged based on two paragraphs cherry-picked for their prurient interest, but there's nothing here that wouldn't fit seamlessly into Letters to Penthouse, if translated into modern idiom. That male fantasies have changed not at all in 250 years is either comforting or frustrating, as you will.

2. Why do straight men who write erotica unfailingly spend as much verbiage describing enormous maypoles as they do beautiful women? Have any such writers speculated about this for the record?

3. And so to bed.

P.S. Oh yeah, the cover. Soft focus photograph with strategically placed title. Ho hum. Odd detail: paper has a canvas texture the scan doesn't show. To lend a little class to the product?

Bought: The Shining

2008-09-14T20:11:00.000-07:00

Another find from the Book Hut in beautiful Ocean Shores. The price ($3.50) and the mention of Cujo on the cover dates this edition to the year 1981maybe2. Astonishingly, it appears to be unread, although I like to imagine it had one previous owner who, like me, bends the pages of his paperbacks instead of the spines. God only knows how many copies of The Shining have been sold in the last 30 years. Used bookstores, without exception, have King spilling off the shelves and out into the street. I'm sure more than a few Christines have been used as kindling or to plug drafts in the siding on long winter days. But just try to find one of those gajillion copies without unsightly spinal creases!
How is Stephen King like William Shakespeare? At any given time all of his work (as far as I know) is in print, an astonishing measure of success with at least one interesting consequence: one of the pleasures (I would imagine) of being Stephen King is that every few years all your books get new covers. His first, Carrie, has had a dozen or more just in the US. I wonder if he's ever lined up all the Carries or Salem's Lots or Shinings chronologically from first edition to latest, 30 years of evolving book design laid out before him. Maybe not. But I know I would do things like that if I were him.
I think this minimalist design is brilliant, although it (and the back cover blurbage) might mislead the potential buyer into thinking he's holding yet another evil/possessed child novel. Why is the little boy on the cover faceless? Because he was born in the caul. Look it up.

Bought: Rogue Roman

2008-09-14T15:39:00.000-07:00

The Book Hut in Ocean Shores took a while to find. It's actually about 400 square feet of space inside a little community center on Chance a La Mer (chance with the sea? gamble with the sea? dunno). A sign outside informed me that sales supported the center, which made it hard to quibble with the prices, which were on the high side.
When you walk into a tiny place like that (or a garage sale, or a "paperback x-change" catering to ladies buying sackfuls of romances or mysteries or mysterious romances) you know a real find is unlikely. But if you do find something, the payoff is likely to be big: a 50 cent book that you might pay $10 or $20 for on Ebay.
Any psychologist or gambler would recognize this set-up that collectors find themselves in, though most likely only the psychologist would know it has a name: operant conditioning with a variable ratio reinforcement schedule. If you want to teach a mouse to pull a lever, you don't give him a small reward every time he does it. You throw a die (consult a randomizer) every time, and give him a big reward if you roll a six (or whatever), nothing otherwise. That's what keeps mice at their levers, gamblers at their slot machines, and me stopping at every yard sale I drive past, all summer long.
So, through the door; dim and cavernous space before me - a stage back there, large shapes in the dark - piano? speakers? folding chairs leaning against things. Shelves on my left, tables to the right, nice lady reading a book further to the right: the proprietress? Yes.
After the bare minimum of small talk I glance at the first table, first stack. I must have made a noise at that point, because Nice Lady said "Find something already?"
I had.
Lance Horner wrote or co-wrote a dozen or so books in the sixties and seventies, mostly so-called "plantation novels", steamy melodramas of master/slave (or mistress/slave) desire.
But who cares? as Ruby Rhod so wisely said. The cover is the story here, an early Frank Frazetta. There's a large scan of the painting here.
Frazetta paperbacks are as close as I get to being a completist. If there were an edition of Mein Kampf with a Frazetta cover I guess I would have to pass, but I can't think of much else that would stop me.
I managed to find $20 worth of overpriced paperbacks to go with my 50 cent treasure, and having done my part to support the community center I drove back to the hotel to see if naptime was over yet.

Reading: Postwar - Day 3

2008-09-10T22:11:00.000-07:00

Here's some depressing math for you. For me rather. Let's say I live another 30 years (possible: my health isn't what it should be, but medical advances could very well balance that out). If, on average, I read one new book per month I will only read 360 more books. Period. That number seems impossibly, insufferably low. I protest! Even if they stopped writing new books, how can I choose just 360 out of the entirety of the written works of mankind from Gilgamesh on?
What if I could boost that number dramatically - to, say, 1000 books? Let's assume my "career" (pause for laughter) remains viable another 20 years and I can spend the last ten years of my life in retirement, my modest needs provided for, with nothing much to do but sit on the porch swing beside my wife, book in my lap, coffee in my cup, twinkle in my eye, blah blah blah.
Yeah, I'd have to call that a very long shot indeed, times being what they are and me being what I be. And come on. 1000? World literature, genre fiction, biography, history, science, etc? 1000? It's still a sick joke.

As it happens, I have read just 88 pages of Postwar in 3 days. If I can keep up this grueling pace it will be exactly a month before I can move on to number 359 on the big countdown/funeral march.
My brother recommended Postwar to me. I was wrapping up Michael Burleigh's The Third Reich, looking toward William Shirer's awkwardly titled 20th Century Journey Vol II: The Nightmare Years, and thinking about what would come after that. To my own surprise I seem to have embarked on a kind of post-mortem of the good ol' 20th, only (or already) eight years in its grave. Shirer's memoir ends with his impressions of the Nuremburg trials. A history of Europe since WWII seemed like a natural follow-up.
I can't remember Marc (that's my brother) ever steering me toward a bad book, and his record remains intact. Postwar is (so far) well organized and concise. Judt has an eye for the telling quote and the kind of transparent style that makes reading feel like telepathy.

On the various Resisters, now faced with waging peace instead of war:

Seen from the point of view of the wartime Resistance movements, post-war politics would be the continuation of their wartime struggle, a natural projection and extension of their clandestine existence. Many young men and women who came to the fore in the wartime underground had known no other form of public life: in Italy since 1924, in Germany, Austria and most of Eastern Europe since the early thirties, and throughout occupied continental Europe since 1940, normal politics were unknown. Political parties had been banned, elections rigged or abolished. To oppose the authorities, to advocate social change or even political reform, was to place yourself beyond the law.

On the near-universal perception that planned economies were necessary:

There was a great faith in the ability (and not just the duty) of government to solve large-scale problems by mobilizing and directing people and resources to collectively useful ends. Obviously this way of seeing things was particularly attractive to socialists; but the idea that a well-planned economy meant a richer, fairer and better-regulated society was taken up by a very broad constituency, including the Christian Democratic parties then rising to prominence all over Western Europe. The English historian A. J. P. Taylor told BBC listeners in November 1945 that "nobody in Europe believes in the American way of life - that is, private enterprise; or, rather, those who believe in it are a defeated party which seems to have no more future than the Jacobites in England after 1688". Taylor exaggerated as always, he was wrong in the long run (but who isn't?) and he might have been surprised to learn about the planist enthusiasms of many New Dealers prominent in the contemporary US administration of Germany. But at the time he was broadly correct.

On the post-war German "economy":

In Germany there was no functioning currency. The black market flourished and cigarettes were the accepted medium of exchange ... The value of a carton of American cigarettes in Berlin ranged from $60 - $165, an opportunity for soldiers in the American occupation forces to make serious money converting and re-converting their cigarette allocation: in the first four months of the Allied occupation US troops in Berlin alone sent home $11 million more than they received in wages. In Braunschweig, 600 cigarettes would buy you a bicycle...

The whole family is packing up this weekend and going to Ocean Shores so Timothy and Nicholas can see the beach before winter sets in again. Maybe I can make some real progress while we're there.

The Pursuit of Crappyness: example #1

2008-09-09T21:25:00.000-07:00

"So bad it's good" doesn't work for me the way it used to. When I was a lad my friends and I got no end of jollies out of bad fiction, bad music and, naturally, bad movies.
Nowadays bad is mostly just bad, and I avoid it. Life is short, after all. But I do keep a handful of paperbacks whose covers are so bad it's hard to believe they exist at all.

This isn't one of them. This is my favorite Shell Scott paperback. The link takes you to a terrific article on the Thrilling Detective site. If you're me (and for all I know you are) you could lose days of your life exploring T.D. Caveat lector.
The sixties Scotts were all guaranteed to have two things on the cover: one (or more) scantily clad women, many painted by the one and only Robert McGinnis; and a distinctive portrait of the smirking Scott, looking a little like Dobie Gillis's evil twin.
Later, Scott went to Pocket Books and (briefly) photo covers. And now we enter the ninth circle of paperback hell...

I guess Dwayne Hickman wasn't available to model Scott. So they called in Tito Puente, made him up as an Oompa Loompa, and posed him next to Melanie from the secretarial pool.
A lot of things could be said about this cover, but all that come to mind are pointlessly cruel, so I'll leave it be - except to note that if they hadn't splurged on satin sheets they might have been able to afford a background.

Reading: Postwar - Day 1

2008-09-08T21:07:00.000-07:00

My brother recommended this one to me, and I picked it up at Half Price Books a month or so ago. The trade paperback is available now, but I don't have much use for trades (a rant-worthy topic I will save for a future post) and I can almost always find a used hardcover cheaper anyway (seven bucks, in this case). Brilliant cover design, somewhat wasted on me, since I display my hardbacks sans cover.
I don't know anything about Judt, and I'm not going out of my way to find out until I've finished this monster.
Which may take a while. I like to think I'm a good reader. I know I'm a slow one, without much reading time to start with. I've got an hour at lunch everyday, plus whatever time I can steal away from the boys and the wife and household duties and the endless distractions the internet offers, including this blog. Oh, and sleep. And drive-time. Work. Not much give in any of those.
Not much to say about the first 30 pages, except that Judt has a lot of numbers in his utility belt and he's not afraid to use them. Here's a somewhat condensed excerpt, virtually number-free, to give you an idea of his style.

The continent of Europe was once an intricate, interwoven tapestry of overlapping languages, religions, communities and nations. Many of its cities ... were truly multicultural societies avant le mot, where Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims, Jews and others lived in familiar juxtaposition. We should not idealise this old Europe. ... but it was real, and it survived into living memory.
Between 1914 and 1945, however, that Europe was smashed into the dust. The tidier Europe that emerged, blinking, into the second half of the twentieth century had fewer loose ends. Thanks to war, occupation, boundary adjustments, expulsions and genocide, almost everybody now lived in their own country, among their own people. For forty years after WWII Europeans in both halves of Europe lived in hermetic national enclaves where surviving religious or ethnic minorities ... were thoroughly integrated into its cultural and political mainstream.
But since the 1980s, and above all since the fall of the Soviet Union and the enlargement of the EU, Europe is facing a multicultural future.
This new presence of Europe's living 'others' - perhaps fifteen million Muslims in the EU as currently constituted, for example, with a further eighty million awaiting admission in Bulgaria and Turkey - has thrown into relief not just Europe's current discomfort at the prospect of ever greater variety, but also the ease with which the dead 'others' of Europe's past were cast far out of mind. Since 1989 it has become clearer than it was before just how much the stability of post-war Europe rested upon the accomplishments of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Between them, and assisted by wartime collaborators, the dictators blasted flat the demographic heath upon which the foundations of a new and less complicated continent were then laid.

That's from the introduction, and I like it very much. Blinking. Demographic heath. The understated irony of the dictators' accomplishments. I'll be looking for more of it once I get past the necessarily number-heavy portrait of Europe circa 1945: how many refugees where and of what nationality, how many dead and of what cause, what percentages of homes, industry, roads, rail destroyed in what nations, etc. Oy.

Bought: The World of Tiers

2008-09-07T01:50:00.000-07:00

I drive a delivery truck in south King County, Washington. This Friday I was out east of Black Diamond, near the end of a county road that wrapped around a little lake up in the hills. Instead of trying to turn around in one of the steep gravel drives leading down to the lake, I drove to the end of the road, where I knew there were a couple of houses and a circle of asphalt just big enough to turn my truck around. When the cul-de-sac came into view I couldn't believe my eyes: the last house on this dead-end street was holding a yard sale. Now, I make a point of watching for sales during the summer, and I hadn't noticed any signs on the way out. Maybe they put an ad in the paper or maybe they were just naturally optimistic. A fortyish woman and her sixtyish father sat in lawn chairs at one end of a ragged arc of tables covered with the usual crap. The books were in three boxes, sorted for my convenience: one box of true crime, mostly Ann Rule, a local author; a box of recent "thrillers", legal, historical and romantic; and finally a box of fantasy and fantasy-tinged sf, including this hefty SFBC omnibus edition of Philip José Farmer's World of Tiers series. What to do?

1. I felt obliged to buy something. I might be the first customer of the day. I might be the only customer.
2. Farmer is a sentimental favorite of mine. First encounter: "Riders of the Purple Wage" in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions, one of the few stories in that fabled anthology that seems, in retrospect, not just very, very good (they all were that), but genuinely dangerous. Looking back now, I am astounded at the subversion - sexual, political, aesthetic, what have you - that I found in my junior high library, smuggled in under cover of sf.
3. I knew I was going to finish The Courts of Chaos at lunch or that night after work, which meant I needed to decide on a new book by 5:45 a.m. Monday morning (my God! that's less than twelve hours away as I write this). The next "grown-up" book in my sights is Tony Judt's Post War, a history of Europe since 1945. A 42 year old should be reading grown-up books, but I am a fanboy, and I value fiction, especially the imaginative literatures marketed as sf and fantasy, more than anything else. So when I should pat myself on the back for reading The Anatomy of Fascism, instead I scold myself for never finishing The Dreamthief's Daughter. After the Riverworld series, the World of Tiers books are Farmer's best known, and I've never read them. The omnibus would make a terrific reading copy, something I could take to work everyday without worrying about it getting beat up.
4. Naked people. Practically naked. Tarzan and Jane there on the cover. That's another early Boris Vallejo, recycled from a two volume SFBC omnibus of the same five novels published circa 1980. Never underestimate naked.

So I bought it, plus a paperback anthology of end-of-the-world stories called Armageddons, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. I probably have half the contents or more already but what the hey.
The omnibus was published in 2001. The SFBC has a snazzy new logo for the spine of the thing but otherwise same old BCE. Worth two bucks? Absolutely. Going on the shelf with the real books? Enhh...

Bought: The Chronicles of Amber Volume II

2008-09-06T09:19:00.000-07:00

Something must be wrong with me. In the space of a week I have paid good money for two book club editions.
Granted, the first was an emergency purchase: I went to work Tuesday without my copy of Roger Zelazny's Sign of the Unicorn. As lunch time approached I ducked into Baker Street Books (nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes: the store lies at the west end of Baker St. in Black Diamond, Wa.) to grab a reading copy to get me through my lunch break. They had every book in the series except Sign. I turned in desperation to the hardbacks and found multiple copies (of course) of the SFBC omnibus editions, late 70's vintage. Oh well. The Man with the Mustache made sure I knew it was the second volume of a set, tapped the cover, said "Good books," and rang up my $4 purchase.
Now that book sits out in the garage like the redheaded stepchild it is, waiting to be taken to Goodwill. When I was 13 or so the Science Fiction Book Club suckered me in with their 4 for a dollar deal, and over the next two years my shelves slowly filled with BCEs: slightly smaller, slightly shabbier versions of actual hardcovers. All are gone now, sold for pennies on the dollar or donated to libraries or simply thrown away. I quickly learned the disdain in which (most) BCEs are held by collectors, and now I would no more allow one in my library than I would let one of my wife's Sandra Browns share shelf space with my Ursula K. LeGuins. Tracy Samantha Haven (née Lord) once said that the worst kind of snob is an intellectual snob, but it seems unlikely she had ever met a fanboy snob. We've got intellectual snobs beat all to hell.

P.S. Nice cover, though. For twenty years or more, Boris Vallejo's work has tended toward pin-up, and oiled-up, muscle-mag pin-up at that. But I grow fonder of his early stuff as the years go by. This 1978 painting isn't one of his best (either that "sword" is about 7 inches long or he seriously screwed up the perspective) but I like the composition and it's also a good example of one of his real strengths: a bold, hallucinatory and magnificently pulpy use of color. The scan above is pretty washed out, and too small anyway. These three sites have larger scans, arranged chronologically for an idea of how his focus has changed over time.