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Post by wildfire2099 on Sept 10, 2024 22:40:05 GMT -5
My dive into Cimmerian September:
Blood of the Serpent
SM Sterling
I picked this up to help celebrate Cimmerian September... I've been wanting to read it for a while... SM Stirling writing a Conan story seemed like an odd fit, and I was excited to see how it worked.
The story is a direct lead it to Red Nails... Stirling takes the conversation Conan and Valeria have at the beginning of the story and expands on it and fleshes it out. In fact, his story ends with a direct quote from the story and leads right into it, which is neat.
The actual story, sadly is a bit of a mess. Stirling clearly had point points, and followed them, but his Conan is a generic barbarian lout that lacks the depth of character that makes him great. The story starts with a 50 page bar scene, which gives the scene where Valeria had a conflict with a Stygian noble and lead her to leaving alone through the jungle. To get there though, they had fights against wildlife.. over and over and over again. Like 8 different times. It was VERY repetitive. Conan did end up meaning some fun tribal types eventually that were the best two scenes (though still with some wild animal attacks).
Stirling did create some interesting characters both there and Conan and Valeria's comrades in arms, but he also created a fortune in gold that makes the events that happen to lead into Red Nails make alot less sense.
Overall, a great idea with rather poor execution.
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Post by MRPs_Missives on Sept 10, 2024 23:24:13 GMT -5
Continued Cimmerian September with a reread of The Pool of the Black One. wildfire2099 I found Blood of the Serpent to be mildly entertaining. Not great, not bad, just kind of in the middle of pastiche land for Conan. It had some issues with pacing and characterization (I felt at times like Conan got stuck in a Tarzan novel), and it probably wasn't the best book to try to relaunch a line of Conan pastiche with, but it was ok. I read if from the library and I haven't felt the need to go out and buy the HC, and I doubt it will ever get a mass market PB release. I am enjoying Emerald Lotus in City of the Dead more, but it was an old Tor release, the second story in City of the Dead is new, a sequel to Emerald Lotus. The short story serialized in Marvel's Conan the Barbarian as back matter is a bridge of sorts between the two, and it was one of the initial releases of the Amazon/Kindle Howard pastiche series they have been doing for the better part of a year. I enjoyed in when I read it in the comics, but was at a loss who some of the supporting characters were, as they were introduced in Emerald Lotus which I hadn't read at the time. Meeting them in Lotus, is putting elements of that bridge story into perspective. -M |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Sept 10, 2024 23:54:16 GMT -5
I'm mildly interested in that... I thought the supporting cast was a bit much.. almost felt like a D&D campaign more than a Conan story, but maybe having the context is better.
I AM definitely looking forward to James Lovegrove writing the next one... I liked his Holmes/Cthulu mash up alot.
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Post by driver1980 on Sept 11, 2024 6:55:31 GMT -5
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Post by MRPs_Missives on Sept 11, 2024 21:40:28 GMT -5
Two for today for Cimmerian September, with rereads of both Rogues in the House and the Vale of Lost Woman. That's 12 of 21 original REH stories down.
-M
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Post by MRPs_Missives on Sept 12, 2024 17:33:34 GMT -5
Continuing my Cimmerian September, I reread The Devil in Iron today, which was the last of the Howard stories in the first Del Rey Conan volume-The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian  I am skipping most of the drafts and fragments this time, but I am going to reread the Hyborian Age essay which is in the appendices of the book, and the first part of Patrice Louinet's essay The Hyborian Genesis before moving on to the second Del Ray volume this weekend. -M |
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Roquefort Raider
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Sept 14, 2024 9:11:51 GMT -5
Two for today for Cimmerian September, with rereads of both Rogues in the House and the Vale of Lost Woman. That's 12 of 21 original REH stories down. Your post got me to read Vale of Lost Women again; I had forgotten that it was the source of my favourite Kurt Busiek Conan scene: the one where he decides to tarry a little longer and listen to Zamorian philosophers. So... Thanks! |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Sept 14, 2024 11:31:31 GMT -5
 All Grass Isn't Green by A.A. Fair aka Erle Stanley Gardner
And thus we come to the end of the Cool and Lam series. And it ends not with a bang...and if not quite a whimper, it's little more than a soft moan. The series had long since fallen in to formula and this was no exception. And I know that Gardner had been battling cancer and was very sick when this one was written and died shortly thereafter. But there's just nothing here that's anything but a pale shadow of the best of the series. It drives along on the formula and it's readable, but that's it. Bertha, who had long been a secondary character was barely present. Elsie is almost equally missing. Frank Sellers is just as dumb as he's been for most of the back half of the series. Two things almost make this stand out. The plot revolves around marijuana smuggling, which was certainly different for the series. And in the end, Donald shows some courtroom prowess that reminds us that he was originally a lawyer turned detective. But this one you can miss and probably should. Yeah, it's a very quick read. But it leaves a very unsatisfactory close to some characters who were once very very interesting. |
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Post by berkley on Sept 16, 2024 3:31:23 GMT -5
I should watch those too sometime soon. I've never seen them but years ago I read the novel they were based on, Musashi, by Eiji Yoshikawa, and it was excellent. I will enthusiastically second this. The novel was originally a newspaper serial, making it essentially the Japanese equivalent of an Alexandre Dumas novel. The English version runs close to 1000 pages, and that's an abridgment! Despite the length, having been originally published in short installments means it keeps moving. It's a very entertaining read. Fun fact: James Clavell's Shogun ends at the historical battle whose aftermath begins Musashi. Apologies if I've brought this up before: I remembering this same question occurring to me another time when Clavell's name came up but can't recall if I followed through (a thread search says no, but it might have been someplace other than the Books thread).
Anyway: many times when I hear about Clavell's books I feel like I'd like to read them some time. But when I look at them I find myself turned off by one specific element: the western European or American hero that many of them seem to feature. Just recently, for example, I was about to buy King Rat at a local used bookstore but when I picked it up and started reading the blurb on the back cover, it made such a point of the hero being of western origin that it bugged me. I understand that it's perfectly natural to have a western protagonist in a book of popular adventure fiction that's being marketed to a western audience, but that back cover made me fear that King Rat was going a step further: not having a western protagonist just in order to appeal to the western reader, but to send a message of western superiority, whether on an individual or cultural level or both at once. From some of the things I vaguely remember hearing about Clavell's books, I'm hoping this impression is mistaken - perhaps the result of some bad advertising copy from the publishers that misrepresents the tone of Clavell's novel. As a Clavell reader, What do you think? And obviously I'd like to hear from anyone else who's read Clavell or who has thoughts on any of these things as well. |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Sept 16, 2024 9:55:55 GMT -5
All Flesh is Grass
Clifford Simak
I had a chance to read a bunch of Simak recently... I found a pile of his lesser known novels being given away for free at a library last year, and grabbed them.
This is the most famous of his books I haven't read yet, and I was able to get it from the library to read it with the Hugo Award winners book club here on good reads.
I fair amount of the book is what Simak is famous for, creating a very realistic rural town... perhaps too much of it. While I acknowledge he's great at bringing a small town to life and filling it will real citizens, not just tropes or cut outs, once you've seen that, it gets to be a bit taken for granted.
In this one, I wanted more about the Aliens. They are quite a different concept than most from this time period for sure, and it is a concept that screams for more thoughts and discussion. He makes some great points in the 'good sci fi makes you think' category.. especially in the context of the Cold War.
There was so much more to explore with the concept though, I wish there was a sequel. I absolutely LOVE the last bit in the book, (its such a 1965 opinion, but still, nice), but did it work? The reader is left to guess.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Sept 16, 2024 10:03:05 GMT -5
I do think Clavell's main character in Shogun is a westerner.. though it's been a really long time. I planned to re-read it after watching the show, but I couldn't get into it. I may try again.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Sept 16, 2024 11:36:59 GMT -5
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and ClayMichael Chabon, 2000  Finally got around to reading this one, which has been sitting on my ‘to read’ pile (also known as the shelf of shame) for a bit too long. I felt particularly guilty about not getting to it sooner, given the subject matter. For those who may not be familiar: the titular characters, Josef ‘Joe’ Kavalier and Sammy Clay (born Samuel Klayman) are – at the start – two very young cousins in New York in 1939 who create what would end up becoming one of the more iconic characters of comics’ golden age, the Escapist. The novel goes on to detail the next roughly 15 years of their lives (i.e., up to 1954 and the infamous Senate hearings on juvenile delinquency and the supposed contributions of comics thereto). Their story is told against the back-drop of that era, in which the Holocaust (the first section deals with Joe’s escape from Nazi-occupied Prague) and World War II loom large, and touches on the hard-scrabble lives of comics writers and artists as they deal with deadlines, unscrupulous publishers and their own artistic frustrations. This is a very weighty and well-written book, but I honestly found big chunks of it a slog to read – I think many sections are a tad overwritten and wordy. Even so, I’d still recommend it, because the basic story and its main characters (which, besides Joe and Sammy, include the love of Joe’s life, Rosa Saks, who ends up playing a big part in both of their lives) are really interesting. And there are even occasional touches of humor, like my favorite line in the book: “Bacon is not actually pork. There are words in the Talmud to that effect.”
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Post by Yasotay on Sept 16, 2024 14:52:26 GMT -5
I will enthusiastically second this. The novel was originally a newspaper serial, making it essentially the Japanese equivalent of an Alexandre Dumas novel. The English version runs close to 1000 pages, and that's an abridgment! Despite the length, having been originally published in short installments means it keeps moving. It's a very entertaining read. Fun fact: James Clavell's Shogun ends at the historical battle whose aftermath begins Musashi. Apologies if I've brought this up before: I remembering this same question occurring to me another time when Clavell's name came up but can't recall if I followed through (a thread search says no, but it might have been someplace other than the Books thread).
Anyway: many times when I hear about Clavell's books I feel like I'd like to read them some time. But when I look at them I find myself turned off by one specific element: the western European or American hero that many of them seem to feature. Just recently, for example, I was about to buy King Rat at a local used bookstore but when I picked it up and started reading the blurb on the back cover, it made such a point of the hero being of western origin that it bugged me. I understand that it's perfectly natural to have a western protagonist in a book of popular adventure fiction that's being marketed to a western audience, but that back cover made me fear that King Rat was going a step further: not having a western protagonist just in order to appeal to the western reader, but to send a message of western superiority, whether on an individual or cultural level or both at once. From some of the things I vaguely remember hearing about Clavell's books, I'm hoping this impression is mistaken - perhaps the result of some bad advertising copy from the publishers that misrepresents the tone of Clavell's novel. As a Clavell reader, What do you think? And obviously I'd like to hear from anyone else who's read Clavell or who has thoughts on any of these things as well. I haven't read King Rat but I believe it was loosely based on Clavell's own experiences in a Japanese POW camp so you can't really blame the guy for using a Western protagonist when it was basically autobiographical. Shogun and several of his other books featured Westerners as the hero but personally that's never bothered me that much. I'm sure there are Japanese books and movies that do the same thing having a Japanese hero come to the west and set everyone straight.
There are prominent Asian characters in each of Clavell's novels, particularly Shogun where almost all the other main characters are Japanese. If it's the story of a Westerner encountering a foreign culture for the first time, the protagonist, by definition, has to be a Westerner. Clavell plays fast and loose with some elements of Japanese history but overall, I found it a very enjoyable novel. |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Sept 16, 2024 17:36:24 GMT -5
 Comic Book Implosion by Keith Dallas
Ahhh...the DC Implosion. That legendary late 70s reaction to the DC Explosion that cut the company's output by about 60%. Dallas uses an oral history format to look at the events leading up to both the explosion and the subsequent implosion, focusing on the transition from the Infantino regime to the Jeannette Kahn regime. For those of us who lived through it but weren't in a position to see anything in the fan press at the time (probably most of us) this is very interesting. Of particular note (to me) were the reminiscences of Mike Gold, the first DC public relations manager. It was also interesting to see that Marvel actually went through a pretty similar period of book cancelling at the same time, that simply wasn't as publicized. Of course Marvel wasn't cutting those books directly on the heels of the price increase from 35 cents to 50 cents and the accompanying hoopla. I was also interested to see some significant thoughts about DC's Dollar Comics format. I bought almost none of those books because they were just too rich for my blood at the time. If you were a comic buyer in 1978 this will be very interesting to you. As usual, the layout is traditional Twomorrows, so you're getting a lot of images with your text. It's a fun book and it definitely answers some questions that have lingered for me for almost 50 years. |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Sept 16, 2024 17:44:58 GMT -5
All Flesh is Grass Clifford Simak I had a chance to read a bunch of Simak recently... I found a pile of his lesser known novels being given away for free at a library last year, and grabbed them. This is the most famous of his books I haven't read yet, and I was able to get it from the library to read it with the Hugo Award winners book club here on good reads. I fair amount of the book is what Simak is famous for, creating a very realistic rural town... perhaps too much of it. While I acknowledge he's great at bringing a small town to life and filling it will real citizens, not just tropes or cut outs, once you've seen that, it gets to be a bit taken for granted. In this one, I wanted more about the Aliens. They are quite a different concept than most from this time period for sure, and it is a concept that screams for more thoughts and discussion. He makes some great points in the 'good sci fi makes you think' category.. especially in the context of the Cold War. There was so much more to explore with the concept though, I wish there was a sequel. I absolutely LOVE the last bit in the book, (its such a 1965 opinion, but still, nice), but did it work? The reader is left to guess. As I've mentioned, I'm a big fan of Simak and I love this book. It was one of the first SF books I ever "discovered" on my own. That said, it's been every bit of 25 years since I've read it. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and ClayMichael Chabon, 2000 Finally got around to reading this one, which has been sitting on my ‘to read’ pile (also known as the shelf of shame) for a bit too long. I felt particularly guilty about not getting to it sooner, given the subject matter. For those who may not be familiar: the titular characters, Josef ‘Joe’ Kavalier and Sammy Clay (born Samuel Klayman) are – at the start – two very young cousins in New York in 1939 who create what would end up becoming one of the more iconic characters of comics’ golden age, the Escapist. The novel goes on to detail the next roughly 15 years of their lives (i.e., up to 1954 and the infamous Senate hearings on juvenile delinquency and the supposed contributions of comics thereto). Their story is told against the back-drop of that era, in which the Holocaust (the first section deals with Joe’s escape from Nazi-occupied Prague) and World War II loom large, and touches on the hard-scrabble lives of comics writers and artists as they deal with deadlines, unscrupulous publishers and their own artistic frustrations. This is a very weighty and well-written book, but I honestly found big chunks of it a slog to read – I think many sections are a tad overwritten and wordy. Even so, I’d still recommend it, because the basic story and its main characters (which, besides Joe and Sammy, include the love of Joe’s life, Rosa Saks, who ends up playing a big part in both of their lives) are really interesting. And there are even occasional touches of humor, like my favorite line in the book: “Bacon is not actually pork. There are words in the Talmud to that effect.” That book was so huge when it came out. I read it in probably 2000 or 2001 and liked it, but I haven't revisited it since. |
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