Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Books


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Astounding

Today is father’s day, and I am no father, but I got myself a gift. One of the periodic Amazon gift cards landed in my mailbox yesterday, and I invested the contents in something for my edification and entertainment.

And in a record 24 hours, the mailman delivered a big box containing a hardbound copy of Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding, a book whose tagline is “John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard and the Golden Age of Science Fiction.”

A book about the history of the pulps – and a very specific pulp in particular, and the literary consequences thereof.
You can see why this interests me.
It’s like my birthday before time.

Now the real problem will be finding the time to read it.
But who needs to sleep anyway?


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Precious books

I’ve been asked, on Twitter of all places, about my most precious book. I gave a quick-and-easy answer, because it was a game and Twitter is not a place for complex discussions, but I also thought it would be a good idea for a post on Karavansara.

And the point is, of course, defining “precious”.
Are we talking about the monetary value of the thing, or are we talking something more subtle, like personal value, affection, memories?
Let me see…

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Blackdog

If you are reading Karavansara, chances are you have an interest in fantasy and sword & sorcery, adventure fiction, writing and storytelling, the East and the Silk Road, history ancient and recent, knaves and adventurers, or an intersection of any of these. You are welcome – those are also some of my interests. Which is why I am willing to bet that you might like the book I am reading right now, and I am liking quite a lot.

The book is called Blackdog, and was written by K.V. Johansen, a Canadian writer that in 2012 was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award thanks to this book. The book was published by Pyr, a publisher that has a killer catalog and also, alas, is usually pretty expensive, but Blackdog is worth every penny. You don’t trust me? Dig the back cover blurb…

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Rayne Hall’s Author Branding – a review

Book pre-orders – I love them. It’s one of the perks of following a writer: you sometimes get the chance to pre-order their books, maybe save a few bucks, and you feel sort of special. For a lot of strange reasons pre-orders are not that popular in my country, and whenever I tried to set-up a pre-order for my books the results were underwhelming. But as a reader, provided I’ve the money on my credit card, tell me where I need to sign.

Case in point, Rayne Hall’s latest writer-oriented handbook. I have half a dozen of her previous handbooks, and they are great: short, focused and to the point, very practical, very savvy, fun to read and useful. When I got the opportunity of pre-ordering Author Branding, I just clicked on the button. Now it’s here, and I have spent some time before dinner to dig in, and then changed my schedule for the rest of the evening: editing can wait, I want to read this baby to the end.

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Old Mars!

Color me happy. After literally ages I’ve been able to complete the trilogy of Martian adventures that Michael Moorcock wrote in the mid-60s using the pen-name Edward Powys Bradbury. I read the first book in the series, City of the Beast (also known as Warrior of Mars), back in the mid ’80s, having found a battered copy of the NEL edition on a bookshelf in a bookstore long gone now. I was just out of the Barsoom series, and I wanted more of the same, only different – yes, it’s a bit confused.
In the span of a short summer I read Leigh Bracket’s Martian novels, C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith stories, a sampling of Lin Carter’s Callisto books, a few Dray Prescott Skorpio novels, and then Michael Kane’s Martian adventures.

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Two types of adventurers

Pierre Mac Orlan was a Frenchman, his real name Pierre Dumarchey. He wrote novels of adventure and crime and, under a variety of aliases, pornography. Visitors of Karavansara might know him at least for one book, La Bandera, one of the early epics of the Foreign Legion, which was filmed in the ’30s starring Jean Gabin – and that tangentially influenced a a later movie called March or Die.

A surrealist and a satirist and not just a pornographer, Mac Orlan also wrote a tiny little book called Le petit manuel du parfait aventurier, or The Little Handbook of the Perfect Adventurer. It was published in 1920, and it’s a nasty little piece of work – as one might expect given the subject matter and the author. If you want, there is a copy of the French original in the Internet archive – me, I got me the Italian version, because it’s got a ribald photo of Gary Cooper on the cover, and because Amazon was having a sale with a 25% discount on the publisher’s catalog.

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