There is no accounting for taste but I am still surprised by reviews and critical essays. I recently bought The Issue at Hand and More Issues at Hand by James Blish. Both of these books are collections of reviews-critical essays written under the pseudonym “William Atheling, Jr.” One essay called “Negative Judgement: Swashbungling, Series and Second-Guessing” ran in two fanzines in late 1953-early 1954. The target of the essay itself is a Poul Anderson story, “The Immortal Game,” (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Feb. 1954). Blish as Atheling has this to say about Poul Anderson:

     “Over this mechanical performance broods the spirit of Anderson the Barbarian, Thane of Minneapolis, Bard of Scandinavianism–the side of the writer’s pesonality, in short, which emerged during his long apprenticeship to Planet Stories. Nobody should need to be reminded that Anderson can write well, but this is seldom evident while is in his Scand avatar, when he seems invariably to be writing in his sleep. Boucher and McComas may see in all these romantic names and flourishes of battleaxes a ‘tragic epic’ with ‘incomparable romantic sweep,’ but what the average reader is more likely to see is the style of a romanticist-manque, and he is more likely to compare it to Branch Cabell than to Matthew Arnold.”

I am 180 degrees out of sync with James Blish, I always thought Poul Anderson’s fiction went up a notch or two in personality when he added the “Northern Thing” to it. Blish is probably referring to Anderson yarns in Planet Stories such as “Witch of the Demon Seas,” “Swordsman of Lost Terra,” and “The Virgin of Valkarion.” Even “Starship” has some sword-slinging going on. I happen to love those stories. They are full of testosterone and adventure. They also display a heavy Robert E. Howard influence. This review came out before Anderson’s greatest novel, The Broken Sword. I can imagine what Blish would have thought about that.

In another essay called “Exit Ephues: The Monstrosities of Merritt,” Blish deconstructs A. Merritt delineating between fantasies such as The Metal Monster and more hard-boiled fare such as Seven Footprints to Satan. Blish makes a swipe at H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith along the way denouncing them– “have a marked tendency to tell them (stories) though their noses.” Going through some of his reviews-essays, I notice that Blish had no use for mixing fantasy and science fiction into “science-fantasy.”

I have not found anything by Blish on Robert E. Howard which is unusual considering he had commented on HPL and CAS but I am still looking.

 January 22nd, 2009 is the 103rd Birthday of Robert E. Howard, so let’s all blaze our pistolas and brandish our Bowies in his general direction and wish him a Happy one!

Take the time today to read some of your favorite words that Bob Howard left us, and honor his Legacy in the very best way you can. Add a libation of your choice, and you’ve got a damn good day.

Happy Birthday, Robert Ervin Howard, the Greatest Adventure Writer of all!

For those of you Howard Fans lucky enough to be close by, or for those of you who had the foresight to plan ahead, you can find the Robert E. Howard Birthday Bash happening this Saturday in Cross Plains.

As REH was born in the teeth of the winter, January 22nd (Howard’s real birthday) will find a lot of us shivering in our snow-covered boots waiting for the 100 degree weather of Howard Days in June. But for the lucky ones, you can find the Birthday Bash this year on Saturday the 24th at the Cross Plains Library from 1 to 3.

Paul Herman will be there with some nice souvenirs, some poetry readings will happen, and the Howard House will be open for Bash attendees. Please support both the Library and the House & Project Pride with purchasing items they have available, and donations to both institutions are most welcomed as well. You all know the drill! And have some chicken-fried steak at Jean’s Feed Barn for me!

And, as is befitting a birthday party: there will be cake!

Y’all come, and have fun! Happy Birthday Ol’ Two-Gun!

      The last years of the western portion of the Roman Empire is a dramatic story. A few different decisions and the Empire might have lasted in western Europe for a few more centuries, maybe longer. I happen to be one who loved reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. The whole massive “book” is a primer on the frailties of human nature. Most people don’t have a handle on the late Empire–the bickering over the nature of Christ after Christianity was triumphant and the role played in bringing down the Empire. Or the warlords such as Alaric and Wallia, half barbarian-half Roman, who served as the Empire’s enforcers.

It was a sick society that was terminal– orginally spread by the Roman Republic and early Principate at the tip of the gladius to non-city dwelling tribes for the most part. In the end, a majority of the population was just not involved enough to want to keep it alive. In popular culture, the story of King Arthur or Count Artorius of Britain and the Matter of Britain is the only one with resonance.  In the case of the Matter of Britain, the Celtic element may be more important than an attempt to preserve a sclerotic system whose political center had abadonded that expendable outpost in the end.

I have been reading Michael Curtis Ford for a few years starting with his story of Xenophon and the Ten Thousand. I have to say the novel didn’t bowl me over, it was boring in too many places for my taste. Despite that, I did read The Last King, his novel about Mithradates of Pontus. It was an improvement but still not to Steven Pressfield level. I skipped Ford’s novel about Attila and leap-frogged to this quasi-sequel. The novel begins with the death of Attila and chronicles a fictional life for Odovacar. Ford has changed history making Odovacar half Hun-half Sciri when most sources list Odovacar as a full-blooded Skirian. He has a running feud with Orestes who Ford converts into a Germanic warlord instead of a Roman from Pannonia (modern Hungary and northern Croatia). Ford uses terms like Germanics for some while using specific tribal names like Gepids (who were Germanic) within the same sentences. There is one great battle in which the Gepids fight the Huns. Ford has improved in that regard. Frustrating is his use of terms like “legion” when the legions were long gone. Maybe his editor wanted terms readers would be more familiar with instead of bucellarii, limitani, or cataphract instead of legionary. The picture he paints is of the old heavy infantry legionary of three centuries earlier using pilum and gladius instead of the late Empire cavalry dominated army using the spatha or verutum javelin. Gone were the old lorica segmantatum armor and in were mail shirts used throughout the Middle Ages. Another oddity is the use of the term confoederati legions to describe barbarian troops instead of the more usual foederati who were more generally used as auxilliaries. Ford’s depiction of the period has things chugging along like it was three centuries earlier, just that there are lots of barbarians running around now. He doesn’t capture the decay of the period. Rome is described almost like the city it once was. It is hard to write a novel sympathetically about the leader of barbarian troops leading a revolt against the last Roman emperor who happened to be a young teenager by the way. The revolt was over pay. Romulus Augustulus wasn’t even a bloody tyrant. My nomination for a truly heroic figure of that period is the emperor Majorian. He almost restored the empire and was a personally brave man. Unfortunately, Odovacar’s predecessor, Ricimer, murdered Majorian in 461 A.D. Odovacar was later eliminated by Theodoric the Ostrogoth, so he wasn’t even an uber-barbarian, just another would be warlord of the time. L. Sprague de Camp once told me that he thought Odovacar to be the closest analog to Conan. The comparison is superficial but that isn’t the first time Sprague didn’t have a clue.

My suggestion is if you are going to write about this period, research the military aspects of it. The reader can use an encyclopedia if he or she runs into a word like spatha.

As the snow piles up and the temperatures dip below zero here in Northwest Indiana, I find my thoughts turning to warmer times and places in the not so distant future. Mainly, I’m talkin’ ’bout

Robert E. Howard Days in Cross Plains, Texas: June 12-13, 2009

Yes, kiddies, it’s that time once again to start making your plans to join Howard fans from all over the world and converge smack dab in the middle of Texas for a couple of days of Robert E. Howard Fellowship. Plans and schedules and panels and events are underway here at Howard Headquarters, and I wanted to make this brief posting as a reminder for y’all to come to Texas in June.

This year Howard Days will be themed towards the Poetry of Robert E. Howard, and to that end we’ve invited Larry Thomas, Texas Poet Laureate 2008, to be our Guest of Honor. We’ll have other Poetry afficianados on hand as well, and this year the REH Poetry Throwdown will have honest-to-Crom PRIZES!

We’re in the process of lining up events and panels for this year’s gathering, but rest assured the tried and true activities remain in place: the Bus and Walking Tours, the Friday Night Banquet and Silent Auction, the Saturday night Barbeque at Caddo Ranch, and most important of all; the Robert E. Howard Museum will be open both days for tours, with the adjoining Alla Ray Morris Pavilion available for all who show up.

So stay tuned to this blog, and information will also be posted over at the REH Foundation website, along with the Cimmerian and REH: Two-Gun Raconteur sites. If you’re antsy for information right now regarding hotels and other accomodations and information, click on the REH Days 2008 tab at the top of this page.

So look for more detailed information both here in the blog and the updated REH Days 2009 page within a week, and we’ll help make your Howard Days experience a memorable one.

As for me, I feel warmer already just thinking about Texas in June. Hope to see a lot of you there!

L. Sprague de Camp wrote an introduction to his story “The Hibited Man” in the anthology My Best Science Fiction Story (edited by Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend, Merlin Press, 1949). The introduction to the story is interesting in that it provides a short manifesto on what L. Sprague de Camp thought on fiction.

“Although authors’ opinions of their own writings are notoriously unreliable, I like this tale for two reasons: First, it embodies my idea that the proper function of a story is to entertain, not to teach, persuade, or incite; and that the more scrupulously the writer avoids social consciousness, drawing a moral, or dragging in information for its own sake, the more successfully he will entertain. You know the historical novel wherein a character of 1850 suddenly cries to another character: ‘Egad, Rodney, d’you realize that this new foodstuff we’ve invented will one day be knowna as peanut butter? And that millions (for the population of our fair land will reach 150,000,000 a century hence) will every day eat peanut-butter sandwiches for their lunch?’ Or the science fiction story designed to show that military officers are cruel, stupid tyrants whose main amusement is thwarting noble young civilian scientists, or conversely that the officers are stainlesss heroes ever hampered by dishonest, stupid, bureaucratic politicians. Or the tale that tells us how the world will end if we don’t follow this, that, or the other course about the Atom.  Well, it’s a free country, and I suppose these stories sometimes serve a useful purpose. (Yes, I know about UNCLE TOM’S CABIN and THE JUNGLE.) However, it’s not my line. If I want an expose of conditions in the brake-band industry I’ll wade though a factual report on the subject, but not through the same report thinly disguised as fiction.  Second, I ‘ve been trying lately to focus attention in my stories, on human character and its interaction with scientific developements or assumptions, as have several of my colleagues. As I have said, the pure gadget-story is pretty well worn out; stories henceforth must be primarily about people. And while I hope to do still better some day, this is the most character centered story I’ve managed to produce so far.”

I was reading Steve Tompkins’ latest enthusings about JRR Tolkien over at The Cimmerian and went on high alert when I ran across this sentence:  “My own most cherished version of this material is likely to remain Rhinegold, because of Stephan Grundy’s fleshing-out of the fates of Sigmund, Signy, her hateful husband Siggeir, and the comparatively underexposed Sinfjotli — the strangest and cruelest part of the whole Volsunga saga, reeking of gore and the hot breath of the warg.”  This surfeit of sibilance (from the Story of Sigurd, no less) immediately called to mind one of the more infamous criticisms of REH’s names, L. Sprague de Camp’s derisive remarks on Almuric: “These Yagas take their captives to the black citadel of Yugga, on the rock Yuthla, by the river of Yogh, in the land of Yagg. Here they meet the wicked queen Yasmeena. As one critic exclaimed: “Yumping Yiminy!” [Dark Valley Destiny, p 343; the "critic" was Robert Coulson, Amra 36, 1965]

Others have echoed this criticism of Howard’s use of the same consonantal sounds for his characters’ names: now we see that he was merely carrying on a tradition from the old sagas to which his stories are not infrequently compared.  I’ll add that when I checked out William Morris’s version of the Sigurd story on Project Gutenberg (as linked from Steve’s post), I found another “overworked” consonant: the tale features Greyfell, Gripir, Gudrun, Giuki, Grimhild, and Gunnar (and those are just names from the table of contents).  Goodness Gracious!

 Paul Kearney is probably my favorite of “recent” writers of fantasy. In fact, I think I have enjoyed Kearney more than David Gemmell. He is on record for his debt to Robert E. Howard so he is one of those writers such as Gemmell who are unapologetic in their appreciation for Howard.

I picked up  his latest The Ten Thousand a few weeks back but got around to reading it just before Christmas. He reuses the story of Xenophon and the ten thousand Greek mercenaries who fought their way out of the Persian Empire after their employer is killed. I am amazed at some of the reactions. First, using the tale of the Ten Thousand is nothing new. There is the great 1980 movie Warriors, about New York gangs that used the plot. Military writer Harold Coyle used the story in a WWIII setting. So I have no problem with Kearney on this score. One of the reviews at Amazon said there was little fantasy in the story. Readers are missing the point. Kearney has written a sword-and-planet novel here. There are two humanoid species in the novel. Some of the fauna is not terrestrial. There are hints that the humans, called the Macht in the novel, did not originate on this world. I guess the sword-and-planet novel may be something foreign to readers under age 40. Back in the 70s and early 80s, you could go to the local Waldenbooks or B. Dalton Bookseller and take your pick of Edgar Rice Burroughs reprints, Lin Carter, or “Alan Burt Akers” (Kenneth Bulmer), not to mention John Norman’s Gor series. In the 60s, you could get Ace reprints of Otis Adelbert Kline, Ray Cummings, or Ralph Milne Farley. You were as likely to read sword-and-planet fiction as sword-and-sorcery fiction thirty years back.

     Kearney’s description of battle is as strong as ever. Some of the best ever written. The Steven Pressfield influence is there, don’t go looking for Edgar Rice Burroughs airships in this one. I have to respectfully disagree with my buddy Scott Oden (a great writer in his own right) with his preference of Michael Curtis Ford over Kearney. I just read a Ford novel that I bought at the same time as The Ten Thousand that I will review soon. I think it is great that Kearney is trying to resurrect the sword-and-planet story. Everyone just needs to get up to speed on this.