Writing about Garr the Cunning (yes, the story is still in the works) was a good opportunity to refresh my caveman pulp readings.
Manly Wade Wellman’s Hok the Mighty, of course, and Burrough’s Cave Girl and assorted Pellucidar titles, but also a a few books that had so far slipped under my radar.
I was particularly pleased – and vaguely disappointed – discovering Dian of the Lost Land, a lost world novel first published in the 1920s, and variously reprinted, most famously in the April 1949 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, with a cover by Lawrence Sterne Stevens that certainly sold a few extra copies. Continue reading
Category Archives: Karavansara Free Library
Ida Pfeiffer
When I was but a little child, I had already a strong desire to see the world. Whenever I met a travelling-carriage, I would stop involuntarily, and gaze after it until it had disappeared; I used even to envy the postilion, for I thought he also must have accomplished the whole long journey.
I must thank my friend Angelo Benuzzi for introducing me to the remarkable Ida Laura Pfeiffer.
Born in 1797, Ida was an Austrian merchant’s daughter, and as noted in the opening quote, she had a great curiosity for the world and a yearning for travel – the fact that, contrary to the customs of the time, she was given “a boy’s education” probably had something to do with her desire to travel.
She had been in Palestine with her father when she was five, but she started to travel seriously much later, when she was 45. Continue reading
The Lord of Joinville
I’m terribly late.
I’m working around the clock to deliver the third chapter of AMARNA in time while keeping all the other pieces in motion.
And as it usually happens, another thing hits me from an unexpected direction: a good open call, with an easy submission window and for a well-respected publisher. There’s not much money in it, but it would look fine in my portfolio.
And it’s a call for stories about crusaders.
It would mean following in the steps of Harold Lamb and Robert E. Howard.
Am I sold?
Of course I’m sold.
So I started doing some preliminary research, and in so doing I stumbled on a book and a character that really really work for me on all levels.
Let me introduce you Jean de Joinville… Continue reading
In Egypt with Sax Rohmer
Let’s kill two birds with a stone: today’s the birthday of Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward, better known to the world at large by his pen name Sax Rohmer – the man who created the original Yellow Peril, Dr Fu Manchu.
A lower-class child that started a career as a civil servant before he turned to writing for a living and claimed to be part of the Order of the Golden Dawn, Rohmer would be 135 today.
His most famous creation, Dr Fu Manchu, first appeared in The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu, as a serial, in 1912. Two other novels followed,and then the character went on hiatus for about fifteen years, only to return with The Daughter of Fu Manchu in 1928. Continue reading
On Verne’s Birthday: Michael Strogoff
And this being Jules Verne’s birthday, why not go and reread one of his books – or watch a movie basedon one of Verne’s books?
And KeithTaylor mentioned Michael Strogoff, and that’s quite a nice choice for Karavansara: an adventure yarn, set in the heart of Eurasia, and featuring chases, swashbuckling, heroics and derring-do.
All in a neat package, courtesy of one of the fathers of science fiction – but here applying his skills to a spy thriller of sorts.
It is also one of the titles on which my generation cut its teeth as readers. But we’ll get to that. Continue reading
Viy: dark-fantasy swashbuckling adventure from Russia
On the second of February, barring accidents, a Russian film will hit the screens (in Russia, if nowhere else) that features Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jackie Chan, Rutger Hauer and Charles Dance.
And it’s a sequel.
So, while we wait for the second serving, let me introduce you to an adventure movie you might have missed, and that, while not exactly a masterpiece, still is well worth a viewing if you feel like a serving of weird action fantasy, with a side of Hammer-like horror.
So, as we wait for Viy 2: Journey to China, let’s talk about Viy: Forbidden Empire.
The Phantom Rickshaw
Nearly every other Station owns a ghost. There are said to be two at Simla, not counting the woman who blows the bellows at Syree dâk-bungalow on the Old Road; Mussoorie has a house haunted of a very lively Thing; a White Lady is supposed to do night-watchman round a house in Lahore; Dalhousie says that one of her houses “repeats” on autumn evenings all the incidents of a horrible horse-and-precipice accident; Murree has a merry ghost, and, now that she has been swept by cholera, will have room for a sorrowful one; there are Officers’ Quarters in Mian Mir whose doors open without reason, and whose furniture is guaranteed to creak, not with the heat of June but with the weight of Invisibles who come to lounge in the chairs; Peshawur possesses houses that none will willingly rent; and there is something—not fever—wrong with a big bungalow in Allahabad. The older Provinces simply bristle with haunted houses, and march phantom armies along their main thoroughfares.
Oriental ghost stories, we said, and let’s start with Kipling’s The Phantom Rickshaw and other ghost stories, that you can find in a variety of formats on Project Gutenberg.
The book was first published in 1888, but I think the Gutenberg edition is somehow later, because it includes an extra story, The Finest Story in the World, that’s not listed in the Wikipedia page devoted to the book.
The original stories in the book were written by Kipling in his twenties, and published by The Pioneer or the Civil and Military Gazette.
Karavansara 