Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Author Archives: Davide Mana


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Here be dragons

After some thirty-odd years, Gordon R. Dickson’s popular Dragon Knight series is making a comeback on the Italian market – in a big fat volume from Mondadori, Italy’s largest publisher, in the same line of deluxe hardcovers that includes works by Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, Clark Ashton Smith, Karl Edward Wagner, Patricia McKillip, Tanith Lee and Fritz Leiber.

The book is a 1000-pages hardback door-stopper, with the classic Boris Vallejo cover from Ballantine’s first edition of The Dragon and the George. The volume includes the first three novels in the series, and I did the translation of novels #2 – The Dragon Knight – and #3 – The Dragon on the Border.

I was particularly happy to work on this series because The dragon and the george was one of my first fantasy reads*, back when I was in high school, and I loved that book to death. Being involved in the return of the series on our shelves is really a great experience.

  • (*) the fact that I discovered fantasy through the Sprague De Camp & Pratt Harold Shea books, followed by Poul Anderson Three Hearts and Three Lions and Gordon R. Dickson The dragon and the george, only later getting to Howard and later still to Tolkien probably explains my tastes in the genre, and my attitude when writing fantasy.


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The CAS re-read, an introduction

Six months ago, on my Italian-language sword & sorcery cinema podcast, Chiodi Rossi, together with my co-host Germano, we did a special episode selecting our favorite Conan stories, and, after re-reading them, we discussed them. We are both writers, I am also a translator and Germano is an editor, so we used our passion for these stories and our professional experience to try and say something new about those stories.

The experiment was fun for us and, thankfully, also for our public, so we decided to do it again – and we are currently setting up an episode about Clark Ashton Smith, going about it just like the last time – we selected a bunch of stories we like, re-read them, and will chat about our impressions and insights on our podcast.

[incidentally, about ten days ago the largest Italian publisher released a second thousand-pages collection of CAS, everybody hereabouts is talking about it, so we will not be particularly original. On the other hand, this had been planned for two months now, and we won’t do a plug for the new book… it’s just a coincidence]

Just like I did for the Conan stories, I will prepare a series of English-language posts based on our chats, and publish them here.
We’ll be recording in our virtual studio during the weekend.
Let’s see what happens.

Once again, watch this space.


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Cimmerian September: The Conan Readathon

I was wasting time on Youtube after dinner, and I stumbled on this video by the esteemed Michael K. Vaughan (that you should really follow if you like good books)

… and I thought, why not?
I own a copy of the Gollancz book mentioned in the video, and this might be a nice excuse to get the three DelRey books, too (I need the first volume, anyway, just for the art by Mark Schultz).
So yes, I could read the whole Howard Conan in September, and because I do not have a vlog, I could post here.
Or maybe do short podcasts – one episode for story (or vice-versa). Or something else.
But I want to do it, and barring accidents, I will do it, by Crom!
Watch this space.


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Expanding ‘The Expanse’

I discovered The Expanse during a book haul, back when Leviathan Wakes was all that existed of the series. After reading the books, I went on to be a fan of the TV show, and I like The Expanse RPG a lot.
The Expanse universe ticks all my boxes as a reader of science fiction, as a writer of science fiction, and as a player of science fiction games.

Now, the British online magazine Red Futures, is about to publish a special issue called The Expanse Expanded, edited by Jamie Woodcock, that will hit the shelves in the first week of July, but can be pre-ordered from the magazine’s website.

The Expanse Expanded is a collection of essays exploring the many different facets of the Expanse universe – and its real-world fandom – from a progressive and leftist perspective.
The volume includes a piece by me, called The Politics of the Anthropocene: Environment and Society in The Expanse, in which I finally am able to put to good use both my PhD in environmental sciences and my misspent youth as a reader and writer of science fiction.


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Birthday Book Haul

I am old.
I am dead tired.
I am stranded in the middle of nowhere.
But I have friends that gave me wonderful gifts for my 56th birthday.
And so, why not share the covers of the books that I will now pile by my desk (and on my Kindle reader) , and read in no particular order to keep melancholy, boredom and loneliness at bay?

Just the covers, in no particular order…


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The Island of the Screaming Statues

I am pleased to announce that my new novella, The Island of the Screaming Statues, has just hit the shelves on Lulu.com.
It goes for 4.99, but you can get a 15% discount, for a very limited time, by using the code GREEN15 on checkout.

The novella is set in the world of 4 Against Darkness, the solo roleplaying game by Andrea Sfiligoi, that provided a gaming appendix with creatures, characters and other wonders for those that, having read the story, wish to play it.
The story features a mysterious island, pirates (of course!) and a lady with a very bad hair day…

This is my second foray in this setting, after The Heart of the Lizard, that was published before the world went crazy.

The book is available in both pdf and paperback format.