Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Tag Archives: Robert E. Howard


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The Fantasy Guilt Trip

2dw9ugiA rambling post, tonight.
A friend of mine just posted a long and rather disquieting (to me) piece on his blog, about the systematic harassing of women that seems to be an established element in what I’ll call, to be brief, “fantasy fandom” (which to me includes SF, comics, games, the works).
You find it here – it’s in Italian.
The author, Elvezio Sciallis, is an independent journalist and a fine critic.

Now, the idea of women being harassed and discriminated in what I consider my community scares me and pains me on two levels.
The first is, such behavior is not something I can accept – the examples cited really hit me hard.
I hate these guys.
The second level is possibly even harder to stomach – my experience of science fiction and fantasy fandom never caused me to think such problems were in any way widespread, or something more than an occasional asshole to be rounded up and isolated.
Therefore, now I ask myself: have I been lucky, distracted or, damn, part of the problem myself?

Does the fact that I read old pulps and fantasy and SF make me a sexist, racist individual?
Am I instinctively what I hate intellectually?
And as I normally do nowadays, I’m writing to set my thoughts straight – and you are reading my ramblings.
Continue reading →


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My favorite classic pulp characters

Good ideas don’t grow on trees.
The good idea behind this post was stolen from author Barry Reese‘s blog.
A top ten of my favorite pulp characters.
Why not?

captain_future_1940fal_v1_n4I normally say that I came to the pulps in a very circuitous way – but the fact is, I’ve been reading pulps for most of my life (say, the last thirty six years), only I did not know it.

Starting at the age of ten, with Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Space, I read a lot of old SF – stuff that was published in pulp magazines like Astounding, or Amazing. Then, when two or three years later I discovered fantasy (through the books by Lyon Sprague de Camp), I started reading things that came from Unknown and Weird Tales.
And then, of course, there were hard boiled mysteries – Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade…
Pulps.

And the movies and TV, of course – Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan, Guy Williams as Zorro…

And what about TinTin comics, or Terry and the Pirates?

What I really missed until much later were “proper” hero pulps – The Shadow, The Spider, Doc Savage etc.
I was more of a strange worlds/exotic locales sort of reader.
As a consequence of my reading history, my top ten heroes list is strange.
Maybe.

Therefore, in no particular order…

black_mask_197408. Leigh Brackett’s Eric John Stark
. Edmond Hamilton’s Captain Future
. Norvell Page‘s The Spider
. Robert E. Howard‘s Solomon Kane
. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan
. Walter B. Gibson’s The Shadow
. Lester Dent’s Doc Savage
. C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith
. Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op
. (various authors) Sexton Blake

Double-feature special mention
. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter
. Robert E. Howard’s Conan
. Norvell Page’s Wen Tengri aka Prester John

“Is this actually pulp?” special mention
. Russell Thorndike’s Captain Clegg aka Dr Syn

And there’s still a lot of characters I have to read seriously – next on my list is Henry Kuttner’s Thunder Jim Wade.
Such was the amount of solid fiction published by pulp authors, there’s truly a world worth exploring out there.

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File under ‘hype’ – a new story coming soon

Amunet

There’s a new story coming.
First in a series, hopefully – with two other shorts in the works.
The beta readers just sent  in their reports, my editrix did her magic on the text, the cover’s ready, now time for a final re-reading and a check of my sometimes quirky (as in “wrong”) English, and we’ll be all set to go.

The story has a strange genesis.
The main characters, Roman centurion Aculeo and Aegyptian princess  Amunet, began their life and their unlikely partnership on my Italian-language blog (strategie evolutive), in a series of posts I did on how to use the web and other resources to try and hoodwink the reader into believing the author does know a lot more about a lot of stuff when he writes some kind of historical fiction.

“Let’s say I’m writing a story about a Roman centurion saving a plucky Egyptian princess from some lovecraftian horror. Let’s start with their names…”

Using Aculeo and Amunet as examples, I built an outline and sketched some characters, throwing in some handy references and a few details; and I did in fact hoodwink my blog readers into believing I knew what I was talking about.
Nice and smooth.

Fast forward two years. Continue reading →


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Translating myself – slowly

220px-Robert_E._Howard_in_1923Back in 2009 I planned, almost completed and partially published a cycle of three alternate history stories centered on the character of Robert E. Howard, with H.P. Lovecraft as a co-star.

In The Ballad of Bobbie Howard, I imagined a universe in which both the author of Conan and the Providence Recluse are women.

Then, in The Shape of Things to Come (yes, I know, not very original, as a title), I imagined a universe in which both Howard and Lovecraft surviving their early demises, and living a long and productive life – REH as a Hollywood screenwriter and HPL as the director of Weird Tales.

Finally, in Lone Star, I wrote about a balkanizad post-depression America, in which Texas rebels led by Howard face their final showdown against the troops of President Lovecraft, leader of the pretty fascistic Eastern Coalition. Continue reading →