Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Savage Scrolls: a brief review

I promised a review of Savage Scrolls, a collection of Hyborian lore by Fred Blosser.
Here we go.

Blosser’s book is a thorough survey of Conan’s Hyborian world, expanding to include many other Robert E. Howard characters and cycles. The basic idea is to take all the details Howard scattered through his stories, and collate them into a curated history book.
Culture, history, politics, natural sciences… the book covers all the bases, in a straightforward, engaging tone.
We meet characters, we visit cities and wild jungles, we learn the history of the Hyborian era. We discover connections, influences, references.
We catch a glimpse of Conan’s wolrd before and after Conan.
And where the original stories don’t go – or where Howard actually offered conflicting takes on certain elements – Blosser interpolates and speculates, filling the blanks with plausible hypotheses, doing a wonderful job.

The book reads in a breeze, it’s quite fun and it will probably send you back to your Conan collection for a re-read of some of the stories referenced.

Savage Scrolls is a good addition to the REH bookshelf, and apparently the first in a series – and we can only hope Volume 2 will be as good and solid as volume 1.


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Orlando furioso, Ariosto and Ronconi

A play presented to international acclaim in 1969.
Transformed into a mind-blowing TV miniseries in 1974.
Broadcast once, in 1975, and never shown again.
I saw it on the telly as a kid – and it’s the sort of thing that makes me think I was damn lucky. No frigging talent shows, when I was a kid!
But let’s proceed with order.

orlando_furiosoThe Orlando furioso (literally, “Raging Roland”) is a classic of Italian literature – a lengthy, intricate, colorful adventure poem in 46 cantos, first published in 1516 by Ludovico Ariosto (the guy you see portrayed here on the left).
The plot is almost impossible to summarize: during the war between Christians and Saracens, in the time of Charlemagne, a host of characters from both sides cross paths, fighting or falling in love (or indeed, fighting and falling in love). Roland, the bravest champion in Charlemagne’s army, falls in love with a “heathen” and loses his mind. Angelica, the most beautiful Christian woman, makes a runner. Both fronts are in disarray. Strange magic is afoot. Monsters roam the landscape.
Many shenanigans ensue.

The Orlando furioso inspired a lot of later works, including Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing takes its central plot from a single episode in the Ariosto work.9780330238144-uk-300
Fantasy fans are familiar with some of the elements of the story as it was used by Fletcher Pratt and Lyon Sprague de Camp for The Castle of Iron, one of their Harold Shea stories.
It can be easily said that, apart from being one of the most influential works in Western literature, the Orlando furioso is also a seminal text of fantasy literature – so much so that Lin carter reprinted it in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line. Continue reading →


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Crowdfunding for fun and profit

I am about to launch my first crowdfunding.
Everything’s set, everything’s ready.

As I mentioned in a previous post, some friends had this idea, of setting me up on a crowdfunding platform (Produzioni dal Basso, an Italian website) and then sit back and watch as people throw me change while I write a story.

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It was a shock treatment to get me move my backside – I’ve been toying with the idea of crowdfunding or Patreon for almost two years now, and without a good push, I’d probably still be fidgeting.

Instead, now the deed is done.
Or at least, the whole system’s been set up. Continue reading →


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More Mummy

Something has been nagging at the back of my mind since I posted my non-review of The Mummy, and finally this afternoon – possibly inspired by the Egyptian-desert-grade heat here where I live – I finally got it.
Because there was something –  the new mummy movie featuring Tom Cruise is actually closer to a “reboot” of the 1971 Hammer classic Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb than than any Universal Mummy film.

We get the lot: the cursed, evil Egyptian queen, the resurrection/reincarnation bit, and the world shattering plot.
Nice and smooth. Continue reading →


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Curse of the Mummy

I do not usually do negative reviews – because I think it’s much better to just talk about the good things.
Good things are what we want to suggest to our friends – not bore them with how much we hated the last movie we saw, right?

Well, let’s try and be positive.

I’ll start by showing my age and say that my first mummy was the one in the Jonny Quest episode The Curse of Anubis.

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Which probably explains why my all-time favorite mummy movie is the 1959 Hammer horror The Mummy, featuring (who else?) Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.
There’s a bad guy in a fez – just likein the Jonny Quest cartoon… and the added bonus of there not being an insufferable dog as comedy relief.

Continue reading →


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Writing when you’d rather go for a walk

A short post about writing, sort of a service post, one of those I have decided to enlighten you with my wisdom sort of posts that serious writers do on their million-views blogs.
Blog gurus say that your post, to be effective and successful, must tackle a real-life problem of the readers, and provide a solution.
So, here goes: say that you have to write, and you don’t feel like it.
The clock is ticking, the wordcount-meter is dead, and you’d rather go peel some potatoes for tonight’s dinner than sit at the keyboard and write.
What do you do?

Now, I don’t know what you do, of course – and I’d like to know, so please tell me!
In the meantime, I can tell you what I do.
And maybe what works for me might work for you, too. Continue reading →