Ballantine Adult Fantasy: Fletcher Pratt’s The Blue Star
Ballantine kicked off its Adult Fantasy line in 1969 with Fletcher Pratt’s The Blue Star. A fantasy set in a parallel Earth where witchcraft has replaced science resulting in a 20th century culture and society more reminiscent of the 18th. In Pratt’s world, hereditary psychic powers can only be held by one female member of a family at any given time, being passed from mother to daughter upon the latter’s coming of...
Clark Ashton Smith: The Necromantic Poet of Weird Tales
Clark Ashton Smith: The Necromantic Poet of Weird Tales by Ryan Harvey During the halcyon days of Weird Tales in the 1920s and ‘30s, three writers became so closely linked with the magazine, and so closely linked to each other through their exchange of letters and ideas, that they’re known today as the “Weird Tales Triumvirate”: H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. Lovecraft and Howard have achieved posthumous...
Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade
Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade by Bill Ward “At the moment, all was triumph. Red-splashed, panting, in scorched and dinted armor, Sir Roger de Tourneville rode a weary horse back to the main fortress. After him came the lancers, archers, yeomen — ragged, battered, shoulders slumped with exhaustion. But the Te Deum was on their lips, rising beneath the strange constellations that twinkled forth, and their banners flew...
William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland
William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland by Bill Ward “Presently, I saw, rising up out of the ruddy gloom, the distant peaks of the mighty amphitheatre of mountains, where, untold ages before, I had been shown my first glimpse of the terrors that underlie many things; and where, vast and silent, watched by a thousand mute gods, stands the replica of this house of mysteries — this house that I had seen swallowed...
Leigh Brackett, The Planetary Romantic
Leigh Brackett, The Planetary Romantic by Ryan Harvey If you were a science-fiction reader in the 1940s, you knew there was one place to turn for a high quality, intelligent stories: Astounding Science Fiction. Under the editorship of John W. Campbell, Astounding was the spot for brainy speculative fiction. You didn’t look for that type of smarts over at Planet Stories, which was only interested in laser guns and trashy adventure...
Sword and Planet as Blood and Thunder: Robert E. Howard’s Almuric
Sword and Planet as Blood and Thunder: Robert E. Howard’s Almuric by Bill Ward “’Lead us to Yugga, Esau Ironhand!’ cried Than Swordswinger. ‘Lead us to Yagg, or lead us to Hell! We will stain the waters of Yogh with blood, and the Yagas will speak of us with shudders for ten thousand times a thousand years!’” —Almuric, Robert E. Howard Robert E. Howard is a member of that select group of authors...
Sword-and-Planet Love-Letter: Gardner Fox’s Warrior of Llarn
Sword-and-Planet Love-Letter: Gardner Fox’s Warrior of Llarn by Brian Murphy Sword-and-planet (S&P) is an odd, anachronistic corner of speculative fiction, occupying a colorful and wild interstellar space somewhere between the charted lands of fantasy and science fiction. Fighting-men from earth travel via astral projection to planets where hovercraft soar, shining cities in oxygenated domes rise above dusty plains, and aliens...
Short Sorcery: Robert E. Howard’s “The Tower of the Elephant”
Short Sorcery: Robert E. Howard’s “The Tower of the Elephant” by Bill Ward “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” – Robert E. Howard, “The Tower of the Elephant” The above is one of the most famous lines Robert E. Howard ever wrote, and it occurs as a young, somewhat naive Conan is mocked by a group of city dwellers in the...
The Great Debate: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard
The Great Debate: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard by Brian Murphy If you’re interested in taking a look under the hood of sword-and-sorcery and what makes it tick, a great place to start is the letters of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. Today these are readily available in a highly recommended two-volume set published by Hippocampus Press entitled A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and...
Hyborian Age World Building
Hyborian Age World Building by Bill Ward Robert E. Howard, pioneer of sword & sorcery fiction, creator of Conan and Solomon Kane, author of scores of stories across half a dozen genres or more, is rightly praised as a master of pacing, a crafter of visceral action, and a writer of vivid and poetic prose. What often goes unremarked, even among his ardent fans, is Howard’s impressive achievement as a world-builder, namely in the...
Amra Who? Inside Conan’s Secret Identity
Amra Who? Inside Conan’s Secret Identity by Bill Ward Quick trivia question: what is Conan holding in his hand when we are first introduced to the character? It’s not the bloody head of a Stygian priest or the becrimsoned blade that severed it. No, it’s a pen. Or, to be more accurate, a stylus – King Conan is improving the map of his Kingdom of Aquilonia when first we meet him in “The Phoenix on the Sword,” filling...
Where to Start With Robert E. Howard
Where to Start With Robert E. Howard by Bill Ward Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) was a giant and a father to giants, his literary creations so potent that they have informed popular culture and permeated mass consciousness down to the present day. But their very ubiquity can obscure and deceive – if two people strike up a conversation about Conan, are they actually talking about the same Conan? What’s going on with all of these...
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