I’m happy to report that nudity returns to the Kyrik covers with this, the final installment in Kyrik’s epic saga. I think it’s pretty amusing how these books say “in the tradition of Conan” on the cover, as if it were even needed.

Shirtless dude? Check.
Naked chick? Check.
Giant snake? Check.

What other “tradition” could this book be following? In the tradition of Zorro? In the tradition of the Bronte Sisters?

Hardly.

If you look really closely and perhaps squint, you can make out a nubile young woman being carried off by a dragon/pterodactyl near the top of this cover, right under the words “In the Tradition of Conan”. Sadly, she is not topless, which makes her the lone female to appear on a Kyrik cover wearing something over her nipples. It’s not much of a covering, admittedly, but as a fan of smutty 1970s fantasy covers, I’ve got to say I was a little disappointed with this outing from painter Ken Barr.

I mean, Kyrik is supposed to be a bit of a “dark” hero, no? Nice iguana in the foreground, though. That really pulls everything together.

Here’s the back cover copy:

THE MIGHTY KYRIK FIGHTS THE DEMON WORLD

When Kyrik—warlock warrior—finds a dying man and a bloody parchment map, he is drawn into a whirlwind of evil in which demon lords contend for all Terra. With Myrnis, his gypsy sweetheart, and the aid of the thief pack, he brings five ancient magical gifts to the land of Surrilione—where he meets betrayal by the very demon lord he is forced to serve.

Gary Gygax listed the Kyrik books in his fabled “Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading” in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide, which is how the ended up on my radar. The Kyrik books (as opposed to Gardner F. Fox’s other barbarian hero, Kothar) are devilishly difficult to find, but I managed to complete the set last year without cheating and using the internet. I haven’t read this (or its predecessor) yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

The talk of demon lords and the release year of this book leads me to believe there may be a fair amount of AD&D inspiration in this one. I’ll let you know once I’ve had a chance to read it all the way through.

Sometimes I post covers to Paperback Flash because I’ve just finished a great book and I can’t wait to tell you about it. Other times I post a quick synopsis of a book I will surely forget in the next few months, and the post here is a mile marker for my memory when I’m later reading other works in the same genre or by the same author, in which case my posting here is almost purely for myself.

And other times, as a service to the community, I like to post covers featuring green-haired women bearing their giant breasts.

You’re welcome.

This beauty comes to us from the pen of one Ken Barr, on the glorious year of my birth, A.D. 1975. The subject (other than the woman and the awesome flying dino-horse) is the eponymous KYRIK: WARLOCK WARRIOR, the second of Gardner F. Fox’s Conan clones. I’ve sampled a bit of Fox’s first barbarian hero, KOTHAR, and was surprised by the originality of it, despite the fact that the main character is a carbon copy of Robert E. Howard’s famous warrior.

Kyrik, as I understand it, leads slightly darker adventures, and has some sort of demon sword (which probably makes him more of an Elric clone). I haven’t had a chance to read any Kyriks, though I’ve managed to track all of them down over the last few years. They don’t all have covers like this one, unfortunately.

A quick word on Fox before I leave you to enjoy my Monday holiday. If the name sounds a bit familiar you probably know him from his extensive comic book work, which spans the late 1930s to the modern era (Fox died in 1986). He invented the concept of superhero teams with the Justice Society of America, invented heroes like Hawkman, re-invented most of DC Comics’s stable of heroes (Green Lantern, Flash, etc.) in the early 1960s in tales that ushered in the “Silver Age” and then he teamed up all of the best ones in the new Justice League of America, which still exists in some form today. Fox was sort of the Stan Lee of the DC Universe, and comics fans justifiably canonize him as one of the major early authors in the field.

But he also wrote his fair share of pulp, and a lot of it will wind up here on Paperback Flash in the months to come.

Catherine Lucille Moore (1911 – 1987) was one of the finest fantasy and science fiction writers of the Pulp Era, contributing two characters of historical significance in the form of Jirel of Joiry, the first female sword & sorcery protagonist and Northwest Smith, a spacefaring scoundrel who very likely served as a template for Han Solo and Indiana Jones. Later, her collaborations with husband Henry Kuttner (often published under the byline Lewis Padgett) would go on to become bedrock classics of the genre. Moore is a member of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and her status as one of the grand masters of the pulps is a given.

I particularly enjoy her writing, which my friend Kenneth Hite once described as “Clark Ashton Smith on Cialis.” When I first encountered her lushly described, vivid prose, I immediately thought of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, though my reading in the last few years has traced this influence even farther back to Abraham Merritt, the giant of the early 20th century whose The Moon Pool and The Ship of Ishtar (among others) cast looming shadows over the Pulp Era. Moore’s use of language and many of her themes are perhaps best described as “Merrittesque,” though her stories often involve a sensual, in some cases barely disguised sexual element that makes them stand out from many of their staid contemporaries in the Pulp Era. Though her influences are clear, C. L. Moore is very much her own writer, and a great one at that.

Here’s an example of her writing style, in this case describing a gown specially designed for the lead character of Judgment Night, Juille, the heir to a powerful galactic empire in the days leading to its inevitable fall:

The best dress designer on Cyrille seemed to be a soft-voiced, willowy woman with the pink skin and narrow, bright eyes of a race that occupied three planets circling a sun far across the outskirts of the Galaxy. She exuded impersonal deftness. One felt that she saw no faces here, was aware of no personalities. She came into the room with a smooth, silent aloofness, her eyes lowered.

But she was not servile. In her own way the woman was a great artist, and commanded her due of respect.

The composition of the new gown took place before the mirrored alcove that opened from the bedroom. Helia, her jaw set like a rock, stripped off the smart military uniform which her mistress was wearing, the spurred boots, the weapons, the shining helmet. From beneath it a shower of dark-gold hair descended. Juille stood impassive under the measuring eyes of the newcomer, her hair clouding upon her shoulders.

Now she was no longer the sexless princeling of Lyonese. The steely delicacy was about her still, and the arrogance. But the long, fine limbs and the disciplined curves of her body had a look of waxen lifelessness as she stood waiting between the new personality and the old. She was aware of a certain embarrassed resentment, suddenly, at the step she was about to take. It was humiliating to admit by that very step that the despised femininity she had repudiated all her life should be important enough to capture now.

The quality of impassivity seemed to puzzle the artist, who stood looking at her thoughtfully.

“Is there any definite effect to be achieved?” she asked after a moment, speaking in the faintly awkward third person through which all employees upon Cyrille address all patrons.

Juille swallowed a desire to answer angrily that there was not. Her state of mind confused even herself. This was her first excursion into incognito, her first conscious attempt to be—feminine; she disdained that term. She had embraced the amazon cult too wholeheartedly to admit even to herself just what she wanted or hoped from this experiment. She could not answer the dresser’s questions. She turned a smoothly muscular shoulder to the woman and said with resentfulness she tried to conceal even from herself:

“Nothing … nothing. Use your own ingenuity.”

The dresser mentally shot a keen glance upward. She was far too well-trained actually to look a patron in the face; but she had seen the uniform this one had discarded, she saw the hard, smooth symmetry of the body and from it understood enough of the unknown’s background to guess what she wanted and would not request. She would not have worked her way up a long and difficult career from and outlying planet to the position of head designer on Cyrille if she had lacked extremely sensitive perception. She narrowed her already narrow eyes and pursed speculative lips. This patron would need careful handling to persuade her to accept what she really wanted.

“A thought came to me yesterday,” she murmured in her soft, drawling voice—she cultivated the slurred accent of her native land—”while I watched the dancers on Dullai Lake. A dark gown, full of shadows and stars. I need a perfect body to compose it on, for even the elastic paint of undergarments might spoil my effect.” This was not strictly true, but it served the purpose. Juille could accept the gown now not as romance personified, but as a tribute to her own fine body.

“With permission, I shall compose that gown,” the soft voice drawled, and Juille nodded coldly.

The dresser laid both hands on a section of wall near the alcove and slid back a long panel to disclose her working apparatus. Juille stared in frank enchantment and even Helia’s feminine instincts, smothered behind a military lifetime, made her eyes gleam as she looked. The dresser’s equipment had evidently been moved into place behind the sliding panel just before her entrance, for the tall rack at one end of the opening still presented what must have been the color-selection of the last patron. Through a series of level slits the ends of almost countless fabrics in every conceivable shade of pink showed untidily. Shelves and drawers spilled more untidiness. Obviously, this artist was great enough to indulge her whims even at the expense of neatness.

She pressed a button now and the pink rainbow slid sidewise and vanished. Into its place snapped a panel exuding ends of blackness in level parallels—satin that gleamed like dark water, the black smoke of gauzes, velvet so soft it looked charred, like black ash.

The dresser moved so swiftly and deftly that her work looked like child’s play, or magic. She chose an end of dull silk and reeled out yard after billowing yard through the slot, slashed it off recklessly with a razor-sharp blade, and like a sculptor modeling in clay, molded the soft, thick stuff directly upon Juille’s body, fitting it with quick, nervous snips of her scissors and sealing the edges into one another. In less than a minute Juille was sheathed from shoulder to ankle in a gown that fitted perfectly and elastically to her skin, outlining every curve of her body and falling in soft, rich folds about her feet.

The dresser kicked away the fragments of discarded silk and was pulling out now such clouds and billows of pure shadow as seemed to engulf her in fog. Juille almost gasped as the cloud descended upon herself. It was something too sheer for cloth, certainly not a woven fabric. The dresser’s deft hand touched lightly here and there, sealing the folds of cloud in place. In a moment or two she stepped back and gestured toward the mirror.

Juille turned. This tall unknown was certainly not herself. The hard, impersonal, perfect body had suddenly taken on soft, velvet curves beneath the thick soft fabric. All about her, floating out when she moved, the shadowy billows of dimness smoked away in drapery so adroitly composed that it seemed an arrogance in itself.

“And now, one thing more,” smiled the dresser, pulling out an untidy drawer. “This—” She brought out a double handful of sequins like flashing silver dust and strewed them lavishly in the folds of floating gauze. “Turn,” she said, and Juille was enchanted to see the tiny star points cling magnetically to the cloth except for a thin, fine film of them that floated out behind her and twinkled away to nothing in midair whenever she moved.

Juille turned back to the mirror. For a moment more this was a stranger whose face looked back at her out of shining violet eyes, a face with the strength and delicacy of something finely made of steel. It was arrogant, intolerant, handsome as before, but the arrogance seemed to spring now from the knowledge of beauty.

And then she knew herself in the mirror. Only the gown was strange, and her familiar features looked incongruous above it. For the first time in her life Juille felt supremely unsure of herself. Not even the knowledge that the very stars in the Galaxy were subject to her whim could help that feeling now. She drew a long breath and faced herself in the mirror resolutely.

So far, my Planet Stories fiction imprint has reprinted collections of C. L. Moore’s two most popular characters, Jirel of Joiry in Black God’s Kiss and Northwest Smith in Northwest of Earth: The Complete Northwest Smith. Reviews for both collections have been very positive, somewhat surprising for fiction that is closing in on being eight decades old.

A lot of the reviews highlight a specific weakness of her Jirel and Smith stories, a stylistic nuance that becomes much more pronounced when all of a given character’s adventures are collected in the same volume. The problem is this: Although Moore’s worlds are vividly realized, and her use of language and beauty of structure easily set these tales apart as classics, her classic characters don’t really do much of anything in the stories themselves. Rather, they watch as something very interesting happens to other people. They often emerge victorious against their enemies by tapping some inner strength or reserve, or taking some internal journey. Though Jirel comes armed with a sword and Northwest Smith packs his trusty heat gun, the weapons usually remain holstered and the stories are more psychological horror that action adventure.

Not so here, in Judgment Night which almost seems to have been written in reaction to that specific criticism. Far from a wallflower, Juille spends the last several chapters of the book literally blowing apart an entire planet with an unthinkably powerful super-gun. It’s a thrilling cat-and-mouse scene filled with carnage, collapsing buildings, and all sorts of entertaining mayhem.

Originally written as a two-part serial in 1943’s Astounding (edited by that titan of early SF, John W. Campbell, Jr.), Judgment Night came 10 years after Moore’s Weird Tales debut, when most of the Jirel and NWS stories were already behind her. It’s a transitional piece, of sorts, bridging the early era populated largely by her Jirel and Smith stories and her later material (much of it also published by Campbell) written in collaboration with her future husband, Henry Kuttner (the two were married in 1940, but this story shows very little if any Kuttner influence and has never been credited to him).

The legendary Gnome Press published a hardcover edition of Judgment Night in 1952, complete with an effective cover from Frank Kelly Freas. That edition also included the short stories “Paradise Street,” “Promised Land,” “The Code,” and “Heir Apparent,” a good selection of Moore’s non-series character, non-Kuttner material. The 1965 Paperback Library version I read (pictured above) lacks these stories, focusing only on the title tale.

Although I like the Gnome Press edition and the other tales included therein are worthy additions to Moore’s canon, Judgment Night easily stands on its own as a great classic of Pulp Era science fiction.

I’ve been launching a major new fantasy RPG over the last month, so please forgive the lack of posts of late. I shall endeavor to get back into the swing of things presently. Having said that, it is perhaps appropriate that this post goes back to the very beginning of one of Paperback Flash’s favorite sub-genres: Sword & Planet.

Like many fantasy sub-genres (see “science fantasy,” “heroic fantasy,” & etc.), “sword & planet” has suffered from numerous naming conventions over the years. Although volumes like Percy Gregg’s dreary and pedantic Across the Zodiac (1880) and Edwin Lester Arnold’s Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905) introduced some of the broad themes that would go on to define the sub-genre, the defining seminal work that crystallized everything into its Platonic form was undoubtedly A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Originally published as a 1912 All-Story serial entitled Under the Moons of Mars, the tale featured the Martain adventures of a Confederate Civil War veteran named John Carter mysteriously transported to a Mars peopled by decadent societies of honor-bound swordsmen, roving tribes of four-armed green-skinned noble savages, armadas of airships and a veritable parade (in later volumes) of incomparable princesses in constant need of rescue from the machinations of nefarious evil-doers. It’s fast-paced, exciting stuff painted vividly with a keen eye for cultural detail and a deft hand at crafting compelling action scenes.

It’s no surprise that A Princess of Mars is one of the most influential science fiction tales in the history of American Literature. With little concrete science to speak of and swordplay and barbarism running as major themes in almost every chapter, A Princess of Mars and its sequels were precursors of the sword & sorcery movement that would emerge from the pulp work of writers like C. L. Moore, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. Howard himself joined the teeming ranks of Burroughs pastichers with his own Almuric (1939), which views ERB’s archetypal story through a characteristically brutal lens.

By the time Howard got to the trough it had been fairly well picked over by other writers working in the Burroughs “tradition,” folks like Ralph Milne Farley, Ray Cummings, and Otis Adelbert Kline. These authors used many of Burroughs’s conceits to chart adventures of their own (usually on other planets such as Venus and Mercury) featuring swordplay and revolution on distant worlds. But, really, it all comes back to the pattern established in the outset of A Princess of Mars.

Roughly stated, the pattern is this:

1 ) Hero with swordfighting skill is mysteriously transported from Earth to Mars.
2 ) Hero is surprised at his ability to leap great distances and his relative strength thanks to the lower gravity of his new planet.
3 ) Hero encounters a dangerous monster.
4 ) Hero encounters a seemingly evil outsider culture, but then becomes adopted by that culture for his prowess at arms.
5 ) Hero meets incomparably beautiful princess. He falls instantly in love.
6 ) Princess gets kidnapped.
7 ) Hero rescues princess.
8 ) On the eve of Hero and Princess’ wedding, the Hero is mysteriously whisked back to Earth, where he shakes his fist at the sky and swears to get back to Mars.
9 ) The end.

Perhaps it’s the raw simplicity of the plot that struck a nerve that would create an entire genre out of rewriting this one book, but I think Burroughs himself deserves a lot of credit for crafting a very exciting narrative while slowly revealing intriguing cultural details about worlds we can see through our telescopes, and even sometimes with the naked eye. There’s a certain caché when you set a tale on Mars, as opposed to some random planet whose name you pulled out of your ass. Almuric or Kaldar, World of Antares or Scorpio might be good names, but they can’t compete with the mythic power of Mars. A dying planet with a dying culture. A place of dead seabeds and crumbling canals. As we look up in the night sky or view the planet itself from robotic rovers, there’s a romanticism to Mars that pure fantasy can’t touch.

Despite its freshness and inventive power, A Princess of Mars shows signs of both its antiquity and the fact that it was Edgar Rice Burroughs’s very first fiction effort. Told in first-person narrative, John Carter can’t stop telling you about how he is physically incapable of feeling fear, and often jumps into danger without even realizing how brave he is being. He just doesn’t know any better. After a while it starts to get old, and I’m pleased to report that Carter’s onanism trails off as the series continues.

The other main problem: Coincidence. Or, rather, Edgar Rice Burrough’s near-addiction to it. Carter criss-crosses paths with his love, Dejah Thoris time and time again in a way that stretches credulity. In one epic scene, Carter is piloting a flier in an exciting climactic battle. He gets shot up, and the flier goes wildly off course, flying at random away from the battle to crash several miles away…. right at the feet of Carter’s old buddy Tars Tarkas, who has arrived just in time to turn the tide!

If you sit and wonder how all of the random events that led to Carter crashing also conspired to get Tars Tarkas there at the dramatically appropriate moment, you’re going to end up letting the little flaws in A Princess of Mars ruin what’s really an outstanding novel. The appropriate response to the random crash scene is to go with the flow. You’ll most likely skip right past the coincidence to exclaim “Hooray! Tars Tarkas is back!”

Because Tars Tarkas is an awesome character, and the book is a hell of a lot of fun when you let it carry you along.

The good news is that the series gets even better (perhaps even much better) in the sequel, The Gods of Mars, in which John Carter mysteriously returns to Mars (randomly within spitting distance of Tars Tarkas, naturally). The bad news is that the entertaining pattern established here will be repeated again and again and again in the century of science fiction to come, and is still being copied to this day.

No other genre I know of is composed of as slavish regurgitation of the plot points of a single story as the sword & planet genre is composed of the parts of A Princess of Mars. It is one of the most important science fiction stories of the 20th century, and a necessary addition to any science fiction and fantasy library.

Plus, it’s damn fun.

Since author Mike Resnick was nice enough to post a comment on yesterday’s Goddess of Ganymede, I offered him a chance to share some thoughts about another of his early novels, Redbeard, from Lancer Books. I haven’t yet read this one, having picked it up only within the last couple of months. I knew, however, that Mike held it in similar regard to his Ganymede books, which is to say early work he’d rather everyone forgot.

Unsurprisingly, I’m rather partial to that sort of thing. I suspect Mike is, too, which is probably one reason why he collected several of Henry Kuttner’s early (and sex-infused) science fiction stories in a great anthology entitled Girls for the Slime God.

So, with little to say regarding a book I haven’t yet read, I thought I’d give Mike himself a chance to share some thoughts about Redbeard. To my surprise and delight, he sent me back a long email, which (with his permission) I’ve reprinted below:

Memories of REDBEARD? OK.

I was at NyCon III, the 1967 Worldcon in New York, and while I was there I stopped in to see some of the publishers and editors — none of them science fiction — that I’d been writing for.

One of them was Walter Zacharius, who owned Lancer Books. I’d done some doctor-nurse romances and Gothics for him under pseudonyms, and I thought I’d see if he had any more work for me. When I got there he was amazed at the success of the Conan books. He’d picked them up for a song, these 30-year-old stories that none of the other mass market houses wanted, and hired Frank Frazetta to do the covers — and they were selling like hotcakes. He had no idea why, but he wasn’t a man to let grass grow under his feet, and he decided it had to be the barbarian hero, and he told me to write him a science fiction novel with a barbarian hero.

So I did. And I sent it to Larry Shaw, Walter’s editor, and Larry sat on it for 2 years. I kept writing and phoning every few months, telling him that this wasn’t an off-the-street submission, that his boss had assigned it, but for two years he never looked at it. Then he either quit or was fired — no one was ever quite clear on which — and Bob Hoskins replaced him, found a 2-year pile of unread manuscripts, started with the oldest, and called me his third day on the job, knowing nothing about Walter assigning me the book, to make an offer, which I accepted.

Today I find the book an embarrassment — it’s not the kind of thing I would ever write; it was an assignment from a hack publisher to a 25-year-old kid who didn’t know any better — but surprisingly it got uniformly good reviews, which I guess says a little something about either the state of science fiction, or the state of reviewing, circa 1969. Every reviewer commented the unique characterization; after awhile I realized that all it meant was that they’d never encountered an un-beautiful heroine before.

– Mike

Thanks for the commentary, Mike!

A lot of artists got by in the late 60s and early 70s by essentially aping the style of Frank Frazetta (or producing homages, if you will). Boris Vallejo is probably the best known of these artists today, but Jeff Jones contributed more than his fair share of work to the paperback racks in the wake of Conan the Barbarian. From 1975 to 1979 Jones lived in a Chelsea workspace called “The Studio” with Bernie Wrightson, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Michael William Kaluta. I’m guessing they threw some memorable parties.

Jones vanished from the scene in the 1990s or so, and emerged earlier this decade having undergone gender reassignment surgery. She’s now known as Jeffery Catherine Jones, and this interview at Sequential Tart offers a brief glimpse at some of Jones’s thoughts and influences. It’s an interesting read. I have several Jeff Jones covers in my collection, and many will eventually appear here.

As for the book, The Goddess of Ganymede is the first paperback credit of science fiction author Michael D. Resnick, who enjoys a successful writing career to this day (and who will pen the introduction to the forthcoming Planet Stories edition of Manly Wade Wellman’s Who Fears the Devil?). Resnick seems almost embarrassed by the book (and it’s sequel, Pursuit on Ganymede) today, probably because it is a brazen pastiche of A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I read Goddess last year and found it charming, in the upper-middle tier of “Sword & Planet” novels along with similar 60s work from Gardner F. Fox and Michael Moorcock. I just finished re-reading A Princess of Mars a few weeks ago, though, and upon looking at The Goddess of Ganymede again tonight I can see several places where Resnick could have differed from Burroughs but didn’t. Still, too-slavish devotion to ERB is practically a defining statement of intent for authors working in the Sword & Planet “tradition,” so I can’t hold it against him.

I’ve read more than a dozen of these books from nearly as many authors in the last few years, and almost all of them follow an identical pattern—first set by Burroughs back in 1912—in the early chapters. The books usually start with a brief introduction by the author himself, explaining how he came to hear the story of the manly hero and the mysterious circumstances of his life. In this case Mike incompetently builds a short-wave radio which picks up the broadcast of Adam Thane, an American soldier of fortune drafted into NASA’s secret Project Jupiter aimed at beating the Russkies in the Space Race by sending a manned mission to photograph the gas giant’s Red Spot.

The story picks up from there with Thane’s narrative, and we’re treated to the usual progression of tropes. The hero somehow gets to the planet. The hero experiments with walking under the lighter gravity that will make him a superman. The hero meets a dangerous, monstrous inhabitant of the savage planet. The hero meets the humanlike inhabitants of the planet and learns their language.

That sequence plays out, in roughly that order, in every single one of these books. After a while it’s interesting to focus on what makes sword & planet stories different even within the formula, and here Resnick’s crashed rocket and Cold War in space references anchor the book firmly as an artifact of its time.

Mike won’t let me republish it, so I suggest you hunt down a copy and check it out for yourself.

Here’s Whom the Gods Would Slay, a 1960s science fantasy novel by Ivar Jorgensen. Like Alexander Blade and S. M. Tenneshaw and a motley class of buffoonishly named compatriots, old Ivar was a fiction, a pseudonym shared by a host of pulp-era writers. Whom the Gods Would Slay, for example, was adapted from a novella of the same name in the June 1951 issue of Fantastic Adventures. The cover in my collection is the 1968 Belmont reprint.

Fantastic Adventures, June 1951

I purchased this book because I am a sucker for anything with a Viking on it, and because one of the authors associated with the Jorgensen pen name is Robert Silverberg, a recent interest of mine. Alas, this book was not by Silverberg, but instead came from the pen of one Paul W. Fairman, quite an interesting character in his own right.

A practiced hand at the pulp game, Fairman wrote for pulps in numerous genres under several different pseudonyms. By 1955, he was editor of Fantastic and Amazing Stories. Two movies were made from his work, Target Earth and Invasion of the Saucer Men.

Also, somewhere along the way, Fairman produced this:

I haven’t yet had a chance to read Whom the Gods Would Slay (or, for that matter, The Orgy at Madame Dracula’s), but I sure as hell want to see Invasion of the Saucer Men!

The Carnelian Cube, by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, is one of a handful of 1970s and earlier fantasy cited by Gary Gygax as significant influences upon the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game in Appendix N of his opus, the Dungeon Master’s Guide. As D&D was a primary vector from which fantasy first entered my life and captured my imagination, I’ve always been especially enchanted with the books on this list. I’ve been seeking them out and reading them for years, and each one I cross off the list is a milestone in my reading history. I launched the Planet Stories fiction line at least in part thanks to my fascination with the pulp fantasy on Gygax’s list.

I came to The Carnelian Cube a few months ago with an open mind. I respect de Camp’s efforts as one of sword & sorcery’s pioneering paperback editors, but his dripping-with-disdain biography of Lovecraft and his less than up to the challenge Conan the Barbarian pastiches have always left a sour taste in my mouth. I eagerly await the de Camp novel that demands I raise my expectations, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Pratt is a tabula rasa for me. He famously collaborated with de Camp on the “Incompleat Enchanter” series (also on Gygax’s list), which I haven’t read. His The Blue Star appeared in Lin Carter’s hugely influential Adult Fantasy imprint from Ballantine in 1969, a part of the bedrock of modern fantasy. But again, I haven’t read it, so other than respecting both of these authors as early pioneers, I went in pretty blind.

The Carnelian Cube first appeared in a 1954 Gnome Press hardcover, which is about as strong bona fides as you can get for early book-form sci-fi. My copy is a 1970 reprint of the ‘67 Lancer books edition, with a cover by Frank Kelly Freas, one of the genre’s most higly respected artists.

The book concerns a small cube of carnelian inscribed with mystical writing in ancient Etruscan. When the archeologist Arthur Cleveland Finch sleeps with the stone under his pillow, its magic transports him to the world of his desires, in the first case “a perfectly rational world.” He awakens a resident of that world, with many details of world history and culture shifted to match his desires. Unfortunately, the cube is nowhere to be seen, and Finch must navigate the strange social landscape of a plantation called Strawberry House to discover it and eventually escape from an increasingly absurd and deadly escalation of tension that must surely end in his death. In Strawberry House he becomes Finch Arthur Poet, a man of art in a strictly regimented world. After falling afoul of the law for charges of advertising and indolence, Finch reclaims the carnelian cube and dreams of a world where and individual can be himself.

Thing brings Finch to another version of pastoral Tennessee, this time dominated by an almost completely functionless society of violent nonconformists. When Finch confusedly offers his “Finch Arthur Poet” name from the previous reality, he gets pulled into the dangerous machinations of the Pegasus Literary Society, rife with psychics and murderers. He finds work as the coxwain of a tumultuous rowing crew, attempts to avoid the temptations of a beautiful woman, and realizes that a little conformity is necessary for survival. This is the lushest of the three realities presented in the book, with memorable names (and characters) like the bombastic Hyperion Weems, the temptress Eulalie, the native american ghost-spirit Ganowoges, and an effective sense of growing, dangerous chaos.

Finch finds the cube and drifts off to sleep thinking of his home in the very first chapter, and of the digs of ancient Etruscan sites. He awakens into a world in which scientists brainwash thousands of subjects into thinking they are ancient warriors, setting them in bloody wars against once another to simulate important moments of ancient history. In the end Arthur Finch escapes this cold, immoral world of cold social science to escape to who knows where, and the cycle continues.

Perhaps because it covers three distinct realities, and perhaps because it was written by two authors, The Carnelian Cube is often disjointed and difficult to follow. I went in expecting heroic fantasy but ended up with something written much more like a less-funny Vonnegut book, part whimsy and magic and part literary and serious-minded. I found some of the broad racial stereotypes (particularly the aforementioned Indian) in the book more difficult to excuse as a product of their time than in 1930s offerings from authors like Merritt or Otis Adelbert Kline, and I guess in the end I didn’t think all that much of the book as a whole.

As for what it really brought to D&D, it’s pretty easy to say. The different realities of The Carnelian Cube are akin to pocket dimensions or demi-planes in D&D parlance, and the cube itself literally appears as one of the game’s most powerful magic items. Dust off your old hardcovers and look up the cubic gate, and you’ll find that it’s described as being made of, you guessed it, carnelian.

On the very day I stopped posting regularly to this blog back in March, my old buddy Stan! sent along this charming doodle inspired by the posts here on Paperback Flash. Immediately thereafter, production at my day job exploded, and I had to spend most of my blogging time on various book projects for print, including this, this, and this. I’ve still been buying and reading books, but I simply haven’t had the time to blog regularly, here or anywhere else.

I’m pleased to report that the biggest time-sucks are now well and truly off my plate, and I once again have some leisure time to read trashy sex novels and classic science fiction. Last night I even scanned in about 20 new book covers, which should appear here in short order.

To the few faithful readers who regularly check this blog: Sorry I’ve made you look at those shirtless primitives on that Lloyd St. Alcorn book for so long. I hope to never do it again!