OK, I already wrote about this, a few years ago, on my Italian blog, but I thought I’d do a reboot.
Fact is, in a few days I’ll turn fifty, and I’m getting a bit melancholic and all that, and then a discussion popped up in which our earlier readings came up, and one thing led to the other, and here we are.
Anyway…
Forty years ago exactly I was about to turn ten.
As I think I have mentioned frequently, I was a kid that loved adventure TV series, who soaked up documentaries about space and dinosaurs and aquanauts and what else, and I loved reading – comic books and mysteries.
As my birthday was approaching, my grandmother Maria went to the bookshop two blocks from her house and asked the guy there to suggest her a good book for a kid of ten that loved reading.
And the guy suggested The Legion of Space, by Jack Williamson.
The book is considered one of the landmark stories of science fiction – it was originally serialized in 1934 on Astounding Stories.
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Category Archives: Books
49 cents worth of Pulp
Last night I completed a long and heavy writing job (because sometimes insomnia is good for you), and to celebrate a job well done I invested 49 eurocents in a 1200 pages ebook.
Because I’m cheap.
But who said that expensive ebooks are better?
The book I gave myself as a good job, old man! gift is called SCIENCE-FANTASY Ultimate Collection: Time Travel Adventures, Sword & Sorcery Tales, Space Fantasies and much more.
Which seems to be just the sort of stuff I like.
And sure is, because the guy that wrote all that stuff was Otis Adelbert Kline – pulp writer, amateur orientalist and frequent contributor to Argosy, Weird Tales (of which he was the editor for one issue) and Oriental Stories.
He was also Robert E. Howard’s literary agent.
Great catch! Continue reading
Other people’s pulps: with Dray Prescot on Kregen
I mentioned planetary romance, yesterday, and one thing led to another and I ended up browsing Amazon, using “planetary romance” as a search string.
And I chanced upon a fat list of Dray Prescott/Alan Burt Akers novels set on the planet Kregen, orbiting Antares, in the Scorpio constellation. The series was originally published by DAW between 1972 and 1988, and that’s how I remember it: thin books with yellow backs and garish covers.
The digital omnibuses are pretty expensive at 9 bucks per shot, but I was happy to see they are still available: when first published in Italy in the ’70s, the series stopped at volume 3 – that is exactly 49 volumes before the end of the series, or 2 books away from the closing of the first story arc. The readers were not amused, and the availability, forty years on, of the electronic texts had been saluted, by those that still remembered Dray Prescott’s exploits, as a welcome opportunity to learn how things ended… or how they went on, actually.
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Karavansara Free Library: 2+1 by Richard Halliburton
Something for the weekend.
Adventurer, world-traveler, daredevil, there was a time when Richard Halliburton was a household name, and families would sit around their radio to hear his tales of far-off lands and wild adventures.
His books were popular too, and are now almost completely forgotten.
Which is a pity, because Richard Halliburton was good at telling a story.
In 1939, Halliburton – the man that had crossed the Alps riding an elephant – disappeared at sea while trying to cross the Pacific ocean in a Chinese junk.
Now, the Karavansara Free Library, as usual with the help of the Internet Archive, is here to offer a small selection of Halliburton’s intelligent, highly entertaining books.
A look into that strange world that was, not even one hundred years ago, in which the world was larger, and there was a lot to be seen (and told) for the first time.
1925 – The Royal Road To Romance
1927 – The Glorious Advanture
1940 – Richard Halliburton His Story Of His Life’s Adventure As Told In Letters To His Mother And Father
Historical mystery set in the Boxers’ China
Here’s something you might be interested in.
I’m working on the translation of a very short mystery story by my friend Shanmei – that writes Oriental fantasies and mystery stories set in China.
The story, that in Italian is called Un Gioco di Pazienza1 is set in the aftermath of the Boxers’ Rebellion, and centres around an Italian army officer serving in China.
The story is the first one in an ongoing series.
The fun bit is, Shanmei2 based the main character in her story about her grand-grandfather, who actually served in China after the Boxers’ Rebellion – and she was able to tap into the old man’s correspondence and papers for the documentation.
So this is a proper historical mystery, with all the whistles and bells.
This is going to be a sweet and fast job, and quite fun – after all, I set my Cynical Little Angels around the Italian compound in China, some thirty-five years after the event of Shanmei’s story, so it will be a little like coming back home.
I’ll let you know when the ebook is available with a post here on my blog.
Stay tuned!
The Road of Kings: Conan and Italian Opera (probably)
Sometimes good ideas are not.
Foreign-sounding names for characters, for instance.
Apart from the vaguely Welsh/Gaelic/Tolkienoid elves and the alphabet soup of Lovecraftian monsters (of which my favorite, if apocryphal, remains “Shuub-Wankalot”), a name can make or break a character.
A basic trick I was taught long ago when naming secondary characters in my fantasy stories is to select a geographic area that somehow has the same feel of the place from which my character comes, get a map, jot down a few place names, and then tweak them a little, moving vocals around or cutting and pasting names.
Et voilà, instant names for characters.
The method can backfire spectacularly – in the 1959 version of Journey to the Center of the Earth we meet Frau Göteborg, as portrayed by gorgeous Arlene Dahl; the scriptwriters thought that, if London and Washington are legit family names for Brits and Yanks, then Swedish ladies could be called Göteborg, the second largest city in Sweden. They were wrong.
Much hilarity ensued when the movie was distributed in Sweden.
The name is Goteborg, Frau Goteborg.
But there’s an even more spectacular example of “foreign” sounding names backfiring. A case in which a fine, no indeed an excellent writer, played fast and loose with naming conventions, and probably having listened to a few opera records too many, created a surreal experience for some of his readers.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, Karl Edward Wagner’s Conan and the Road of Kings. Continue reading
Robert M. Pirsing: zen and motorbikes
About two hours ago I wrote “and now I’ll write a post for tomorrow”.
In those two hours, I received the news of the death of Robert M. Pirsing, the bestselling author of Zen and the art or motorcycle maintenance, originally published in 1974 after 121 publishers had rejected it.
And as I was writing a few lines about him on my Italian blog, I realized that Zen, that I read in the mid-80s when I started taking an interest in zen philosophy, is a book that touched me deeply, certainly one of the ten, or fifteen, or fifty books that are essential in my library, that made me what I am.
And also, it is a book about which I never think, a book I never remember when those lists of essential books get posted online. Probably because it got in deep, when I read it. It struck a deep chord. Continue reading
Karavansara 