noun

1. Related by blood; akin

[origin: ca. 12th century; Middle English, from Old English sibb, from sibb kinship; akin to Old High German sippa kinship, family, Latin sodalis comrade, Greek ?thos custom, character, Latin suus one's own]

HOWARD’S USAGE:

Mananan Mac Lir
The son of the sea
Is sib unto me
At the break of the year.

In the white autumn tides
The ghost drums call
When the midnights fall,
And a ghost ship rides
Where the green waves crawl.

[from “Feach Air Muir Lionadhi Gealach Buidhe Mar Or”; to read the complete poem, see The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, p. 284 and Echoes From an Iron Harp, p. 36]

This book is an education. Adventure could be subtitled “The Jack London Experience” at this time. It goes to show how revolutionary London was in changing fiction. At this time, you have some writers who straddled the pulp-slick divide such as Donn Byrne, Morgan Robertson, and William Hope Hodgson. Jack London himself appeared in pulps such as Street & Smith’s The Popular Magazine and Top-Notch. These stories don’t read like what I think of as pulp. It is more like cracking open an anthology of classic adventure stories.

I finally got to read Talbot Mundy’s “The Soul of a Regiment” which I had heard about for so many years. That was a story set in the Sudan during the Mahdi Rebellion. Historical adventure was not a big part of the magazine yet. You do have a story by Rafael Sabatini and one of Marion Polk Angelloti’s “Hawkwood” stories in 14th Century Italy.

A surprise for this volume is I generally like the sailing stories best. I have not been a fan of nautical fiction previous to this. Arthur Somers Roche’s “The Mate’s Log” is a tale of doom in the Sargasso Sea. “The Albatross” is one of William Hope Hodgson’s less reprinted stories for some reason. That is one to creep you out.  James Francis Dwyer’s “The White Queen of Sandakan” strips away the glamor of finding a white queen in the tropics.

My favorite western in the book was “The End” by Stephen Allen Reynolds who sounds like he was quite the real life adventurer.

Probably my favorite story and new author discovery for me was “Brethren of the Beach” by H. D. Couzens. A tale of pearl diving and piracy in the South Pacific. If Jack London had written this, it would be an acclaimed classic today.

There are a total of 24 stories and 2 poems in this book. Page count is 349 pages, cost is $34.95. Go to blackdogbooks.net for ordering or from your favorite mail order book dealer such as Mike Chomko. Editor Doug Ellis is working on Volume 2 so this will be a regular series.

The origin story is what really screws the pooch. Having Kane’s brother as the evil enforcer was too much. Also the Balrog. If you are going to have a Balrog, you better have a Balrog worthy battle instead of what happened in the movie. Less would have been more here. And, Balrogs should be in Tolkien movies.

I was thinking of the same weaknesses found in L’il Abner Versus the Moonies (aka Conan the Barbarian). Way too much time is spent in both movies creating a revenge driven, angst ridden character. Both movies have sorcerers in a takeover with armies and in both the bad guys are more intriguing because there is mystery. You don’t really like Solomon Kane in this movie as the origin story has him as an unlikeable guy. Same with Chip Rommel in Conan the Barbarian.  You want more when you finish a Robert E. Howard story. Paul “Masturbation or What” Berrow is talking about a second Solomon Kane movie. I don’t think the average movie goer wants a second movie. The character is both emotionally and physically spent by the end. This movie is a funeral, not a birth for a series. There is frankly little room for believably carrying on the character.

This movie has so little of Robert E. Howard in it that someone else can do it right the next time. It will be an historical oddity shown at science fiction conventions. It isn’t the worst movie I have seen but I will be hard pressed whether to watch Solomon Kane or Mega-Piranha.  It would have been better had the character had a name like “Samuel Absalom” or something like that. This movie will still probably be far better than the upcoming Conan the Samoan movie with Momo in sarong. That coming  movie is Paradox approved. They got rolled like a teenage farm-boy in the big city on a Saturday night by Hollywood on that one.

Here is a recent update from Charles from the Facebook page on all the great fantasy fiction he is currently working on:

Next up in my publishing pipeline is Dossouye II, the sequel to the Dossouye volume that came out in 2008. That book was a compilation of previously published stories about the Black Amazon. Dossouye II is a brand new novel.

After Dossouye II comes Imaro V. This volume can be considered a book-length epilogue to Imaro IV

Next in line is The Warrior’s Way, a collection of the Imaro short stories that were not incorporated into the novels. Seven of the ten stories in this book were previously published in the 1970s and 1980s; three are brand-new, written during the time period of 2007-2008.

Also, I recently completed another Imaro story for the Sword and Soul anthology I’m putting together with Milton Davis.

Farther down the pipeline is Nyumbani Tales, a collection of short stories that do not have either Imaro or Dossouye as lead characters. However, one story features Imaro’s mother, Katisa, and two are about Imaro’s sidekick, Pomphis.

So be assured there will be more Saunders fiction coming out over the next couple of years.

(Left to right: a leather ‘day’ sporran, two ‘semi-dress’ sporrans, one of sealskin, the other of horsehide, and a military hair sporran of the old 72nd Highlanders.)

noun

1. a pouch usually of skin with the hair or fur on that is worn in front of the kilt with Scots’ Highland dress

[origin: 1752; Scottish Gaelic sporan purse]

HOWARD’S USAGE:

Let Saxons sing of Saxon kings,
Red faced swine with a greasy beard—
Through my songs the Gaelic broadsword sings,
The pibrock skirls and the sporran swings,
For mine is the blood of the Irish kings
That Saxon monarchs feared.

The heather bends to a marching tread,
The echoes shake to a marching tune—
For the Gael has supped on bitter bread,
And follows the ghosts of the mighty dead,
And the blue blades gleam and the pikes burn red
In the rising of the moon.

[from “Black Harps in the Hills”; for the complete poem see The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, p. 58 and Night Images, p. 52.]

Dorchester just fired all of the editorial staff except one and fired the sales staff. Speculation is the company will go into liquidation in the next six months. That means get these paperbacks now. I have contended these five paperbacks are going to be uncommon if not the Howard rarities of the first decade of the 21st Century A.D. Some Leisure paperbacks are rare and collectible. Joe Lansdale’s Texas Night Riders being a prime example. I am giving serious thought to getting a second set for trading purposes in the future. You don’t want to be trying to track down copies in near fine condition five years from now.  They are great introductions to Robert E. Howard. Hey, pick up copies as Christmas gifts.

noun

1. a sheet in which a corpse is wrapped; a shroud

[origin: 15th century]

HOWARD’S USAGE:

Ask not of the glories of dawns that have gone before;
The sunrise dreams are gone from our empty eyes—
The lines are down—the crimson sabres gore—
Ours the songs of defeat as starlight dies.

Ask not that bugle-voiced we once could sing
The riding song, the chant song and the boast—
The years are a sluggard moth a wasp can sting,
And we were born to fall before the Host.

For we are they that are born to songs of defeat—
The cup of gall and wormwood was our first drink—
Like ants we waver on Eternity’s brink
And cry on God in vain for a winding sheet.

[from “A Song of Defeat”; for the complete poem see The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, p. 388 and Echoes From an Iron Harp, p. 76.]

This is only the second Spinrad book I have ever read. About 20 years ago I read The Iron Dream, his satire on supposedly fascist science fiction. It reads like an attack masquerading as parody of Robert Heinlein.  Spinrad also wrote the Star Trek episode with the wind sock planet destroyer.

I can remember when The Druid King came out in 2003 and mentioning it to Steve Tompkins. We both had plans on reading it but I don’t think Steve ever got around to it.

The novel itself was out of character for Spinrad who had a reputation as a “New Wave” science fiction guy switching gears and going into the historical novel field.  The book’s genesis had it origins for a screenplay for a French movie called Druids. This novel is about Vercingetorix who led a revolt against Julius Caesar in Gaul. Vercigetorix almost succeeded in driving out the Romans but in the end failed. He is one of those magnificent but ultimately tragic Celtic leaders you find in history alongside Caratacos, Boudicca, Arthur, Urien, and Hugh O’Donnell. The novel takes some time to get going as there is the setup of Vercingetorix’s life. His father attempts to make himself King of Gaul but is killed under secret Roman orders. Vercingetorix is trained as a Druid, becomes a companion of Caesar, discovers Caesar’s complicity in his father’s death, and leads the Gauls against Rome. There are some idiosyncrasies to the novel. Roman legionaries are referred to as legionaires. Spinrad also switches into a present tense for some scenes. Spinrad mentions in his blog about an editor forcing him to rewrite the book and the writing was getting worse.

The novel is a page turner once it gets going. Spinrad isn’t bad with action. The book is anti-Roman, Robert E. Howard would approve. The cover is hideous as it is  photoshopped pieces of twigs. The book was also published in August which is a dumping ground along with January for new books. The trade paperback is still available with a better cover. I don’t know if the present tense scenes are the result of Spinrad or the editor. Fix that and change legionaires to legionaries and you have a keeper. Then get this book out in mass market paperback with a better cover and put it in the science fiction and fantasy section where more copies will be sold.

For years, signs have been apparent the the mass market paperback was not doing well. The root problem of the distribution collapse back in the 1990s was a significant part of this decline. Mass market paperbacks were once cheap and everywhere. I can remember buying them at K-Mart, drug stores, the old Hill’s Department stores etc. Truck stops in Texas had the old wire stands with a selection of Louis Lamour paperbacks. One problem I have not seen discussed in any of the blogs or online articles is cost. Mass market paperbacks have gone up in price often greater than the rate of inflation. I once calculated that a Lancer paperback in 1966 costing $.60 would convert in 2007 to $3.81. Paperbacks were costing over double that. Paperback books ceased to be an impulse item. You now had to think hard if you really wanted to buy that paperback, Sturgeon’s Rule was always in the back of your mind.

Video games, computer games, the internet, on demand T.V., etc has all fought for the time for reading. I would be curious in knowing the percentage of male readers today vs. the 1960s.  A good portion of potential readers of one genre may have been lost as publishers shortsightedly thought they would market books to both genders, losing one in the process. Another problem is what David C. Smith calls the “Frampton Comes Alive” phenomena. Publishers wanted all their writers to make money like Stephen King instead of publishing more books that each make a smaller amount of money.

The expansion of Barnes & Noble and Borders in the 1990s all but killed off the local independent bookstore. Now the same might be done to them by a combination of Amazon and e-readers.  My guess is more and more publishers will phase out the mass market paperback as they get into the death spiral. There will be more trade paperbacks in the brick & mortar bookstores for a few years but what is to prevent happening to the trade paperback that happened to the mass market paperback? For that matter, will there be some new technology that will make the Kindle reader obsolete? Remember when the cassette tape sold more than the 33 rpm album? Then the compact disk came along and killed both. Now we have MP3 files, tomorrow who knows. The same is happening with the world of reading.

I still contend that the mass market paperback is the way to do things but that involves having salesmen getting the books sold anywhere and everywhere they can. It also means having editors who aren’t trying to sell books to all people (i.e fantasy) and realizing there are potential untapped audiences out there. It comes down to salesmanship and bringing in new readers.  The mass market paperback was originally a success because it was cheap. The multinational conglomerates need to figure that one out again. A collapse of Barnes & Noble and Borders might open up a new chaotic world with a return of the independent bookstore or even the old magazine stand.

I was talking to the Kinko’s clerk today while getting a print job done about the Kindle. I am not ready to get one as the price will come down as there will be competition for this market. I have no experience with a portable e-reader so can’t say if I like it or not. What I can say is the world is changing fast and ten years from now is going to be very different when it comes to reading.