#nictzin dyalhis

[weirdlookindog]

“You would be thick!” she screamed. “Wallow there, and soon you shall be thick indeed.”

Hugh Rankin (1878-1956) - Illustration for Nictzin Dyalhis' 'Dark Lore'

(Weird Tales Vol. 10 #4, October 1927)

[carica-ficus]

Recenzija: Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Stories

Autori: H. G. Wells, Charles B. Stilson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, W. L. Alden, George Griffith, Ambrose Bierce, John York Cabot, Harry Gore Bishop, Robert Barr, Robert E. Howard, Nictzin Dyalhis, Francis Flagg, Kenneth Morris, William Morris

Urednik: Andrew Erickson

Datum: 28/12/2022.

Ocjena: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

________________________________________________________

Ove godine sam naučila da mi kratke priče jako leže te da ih cijenim više nego duže proze, stoga nije niti čudo da me odmah privukla naslovnica ove knjige. Između ostalog, naišla sam na nju u nekom periodu kada sam se baš odlučila malo odmaknuti od realizma i ponovno se okrenuti svojoj prvoj pravoj ljubavi: spekulativnoj fikciji.

Ova kolekcija je ispala savršen izbor.

Predstavljeni su slavni autori koji su bili među začetnicima spekulativne fikcije. Njihova djela razrađuju popularne teme: što odvaja čovjeka od stroja, povezanost umjetnosti i praktike, prolaznost života, ovisnost čovjeka o modernim izumima i mnoge druge, no sve prati izrazito snažan osjećaj znatiželje i široka, gotovo dječja, mašta koja se izražava u obliku fantastičnog stvaranja. Upravo zato su takve ideje, filozofije i pitanja još uvijek danas zanimljive u krugovima ljubitelja fikcije, a ove se priče stoga stvarno može smatrati bezvremenskim.

Većina autora u kolekciji prikazuje žarku želju za pustolovinom koju je fascinantno iskusiti desetljećima nakon što su njihova djela napisana. Njihove priče ne zamaraju se nebitnim pitanjima i detaljima, već izravno prenose radnju bez obzira jesu li one realistične ili ne. Spisatelji ne dopuštaju djelu da gospodari njima, već su oni ti koji vode riječ. Drže se uz činjenicu da pišu o fiktivnim događajima, a time iskorištavaju slobodu da jednostavno odbace ili preobraze prirodne zakone koji ne odgovaraju njihovom svemiru. Meni je to bilo vrlo osvježavajuće iskustvo jer se često susrećem sa spisateljima spekulativne fikcije koji svim silama pokušavaju nadomjestiti nedostatke u fizičkim zakonitostima svojih radova samo da bi ušli u ciklus beskonačnih, nepotrebnih objašnjenja koji oduzimaju od doživljaja priče.

Jezik kojim su djela pisana je stari, klasični engleski koji nije jednostavan za čitanje, stoga neće svim čitateljima jednako dobro leći. Definitivno je tekstu potrebno posvetiti više vremena, ali stilovi pojedinih autora su apsolutno prekrasni te njihovi opsežni rječnici vrijedni divljenja.

Ukoliko ste u potrazi za starijim pričama spekulativne fikcije, a ne znate gdje biste počeli, "Science fiction and fantasy short stories" su solidan izbor sa kolekcijom čuvenih djela i autora. Sadrži djela bogata pustolovinama i akcijom, nježnih scena ispunjenih znatiželjom te straha od onog nepoznatog i onog poznatog.

[pulpfictionbookstore]

The Sea-Witch - Three Stories by Nictzin Dyalhis Dyalhis only wrote about 20 stories. He had an outsized following because of it. His fans attributed #occult powers to him. In these Stories a Norse #goddess brings a terrible #vengeance across the ages, a bug proves to be mightier than a mighty #wizard, and a human sacrifice is made to a god of #Atlantis. www.pulpfictionbook.store https://www.instagram.com/p/CmQAsvLrbxd/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[vintagegeekculture]

Who coined the term “blaster?”

I’ve said for years that the first person to use the phrase was Jack Williamson, who also coined the terms “terraforming” and “genetic engineering,” in his Legion of Space novels from 1936. These stories were a highlight of the pre-golden age, F. Orlin Tremaine era of Astounding, just before Campbell took over and kicked off the era we know:

However, recently, a far older occurrence of the term “blaster” was found, this time, dated to an incredible full decade earlier (1925), by one of the strangest and most mysterious men in all of science fiction history: Nictzin Dyalhis. 

Dyalhis is the most mysterious of all of the Weird Tales writers. For starters, very little biographical information about him can concretely be determined. Weird Tales historian and superfan L. Sprague de Camp (who worked hard to get many Weird Tales writers like C.L. Moore and Robert E. Howard published after the magazine ended, saving them from total obscurity in the paperback era), a man who wrote in depth biographies of weird shut ins who left very little personal trails in the real world, like Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, looked into Dyalhis and could find absolutely nothing, except that, as near as he could tell, Nictzin Dyalhis was his real name, as he was of Welsh origin and his first name was derived from the fact his father was obsessed with everything Aztec. 

Dyalhis was not only mysterious, but did not correspond with his contemporaries like C.L. Moore, Lovecraft, or Hugh B. Cave much, and in his entire life, had only 15 published stories. One of them, the Sea Witch, is basically if Haggard’s She got a happy ending (what kids today call a “fix-fic” except it got published and is one of the best horror stories of all time). 

Nictzin Dyalhis used the term “blaster” to refer to a ray gun in the 1925 story, “When the Green Star Waned,” but the reason it wasn’t caught until now is that he spelled it “blastor” (which seems wrong to me). 

I was holding my Blastor pointing ahead of me; for as I blundered full upon the monstrosity it upheaved its ugly bulk—how I do not know, for I saw no legs nor did it have wings—to one edge and would have flopped down upon me, but instinctively I slid forward the catch on the tiny Blastor, and the foul thing vanished—save for a few fragments of its edges—smitten into nothingness by the vibration hurled forth from that powerful little disintegrator.

[gaslightgallows]

In a strange way, outside of his stories, Nictzin Dyalhis doesn’t exist. (Free to read! Reblogs are appreciated! I worked my butt off on this one!)

The Oddments series is entirely public and free-to-read, but I also have fiction-in-progress, essays about writing, and other off-kilter effluvia on offer for patrons, so if you're not already supporting me, please consider joining my Patreon.

[maxwell-grant]

If someone were trying to make a new character inspired by pulp heroes, but the new character had to be a teenager, what existing pulps heroes should they look to for inspiration?

I'm not exactly in touch with the yoof so I could be off the mark here, but let's talk about teenager characters for a bit.

Now, I could just tell you to look for characters that appeal to you and use them as a baseline and that's probably the best advice here, but if you want the essay and history lesson: American pulp fiction didn't used to market much to teenagers. Teenagers as a consuming market haven't always been the all-encompassing force they are considered today, and the pulps were largely marketed either towards young boys, or for working class men, mostly the latter. This is part of why teenagers tend to show up in these stories largely as sidekicks, which was something carried over to comic superheroes, and part of why Spider-Man was such a breakout hit, because he was a teenage superhero who was not a sidekick.

The biggest pre-1950s traditional pulp hero I can of who was a teenager would be Jack Harkaway, an 1871 penny dreadful adventurer who would go on to be published overseas, one of those characters who was big enough in his day to inspire imitators a plenty but didn't quite make it past a specific time period. Comic strips had plenty of kid or teenage protagonists who are a bit closer to pulp heroes, like Tintin or Terry Lee, one in particular I'm highlighting above is Ledger Syndicate's Connie Kurridge, arguably the first female adventure hero of American comics. Overseas you can find a couple of prominent examples of teenage adventurers published in what we call the pulp era, the biggest and most influential of which being The Famous Five, but as I stated in answering whether Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys were pulp heroes, these were not published in pulp magazines, instead their direct opposites in glossy and reputable paperbacks.

There are other examples of pulp heroes who were teenagers and not sidekicks, but nearly all of them are very obscure and you will probably not find much material for them. And the thing is, these characters were not made for teenagers. They were made, for the most part, by grown-ups, and for grown-ups, and I can't say any of them ever really grabbed a teenage audience. Usually, it's the 60s as an era that really starts to pander to and include teenagers at the forefront of storytelling, so a good start for you might be to look at what was going on in the 60s-onwards worldwide in the realms of pulp and pulp-inspired works, which probably means you're going to have to look outside of the US.

Another word of advice would be to look up characters that are beloved by teenagers. I don't think "teenager" is a great baseline trait to start building a character, but if that's the number one priority to you, then ideally you should look for a good baseline of what appeals to that demographic, what appealed to you at that age and why. You're probably going to wind up with a lot of anime anti-heroes in your research though, because teenagers are deeply miserable creatures and few things appeal more to them than characters who are miserable but they act cool and badass and edgy about it. Teenagers are forced to live with the miserable reality of being teenagers with little to no upsides, so I think teenage characters could benefit more from being based on the kinds of characters teenagers would ideally want to read about.

So, "cool, badass and tortured character super popular with angsty teenagers", "rooted in and subverting older storytelling traditions for a fresh new audience", and "60s pulp hero". I think Elric is probably as good of a place as any for you to start.

Elric wasn't just popular, he wasn't even just popular with teenagers (boys and girls alike, which is also quite the feat), he was "cool". He was avant-garde, he was the hip new thing on the block. He wasn't Conan or Bond or Batman, and you'd hardly mistake him for a hero. He got the rock albums and fans tattooing him. He was penned by the guy who was openly called the "anti-Tolkien". Elric was Loki before Loki, the edgy anti-hero before them all. The emaciated warrior with white hair and black clothes and a demonic sword who suffered in a cool way, cool in his uncoolness. When I think of pulp heroes who achieved a substantial popularity among teenage audiences, Elric is definitely the first that comes to mind.

Another good example might be Captain Harlock, easily one of the premier Pulp Heroes among manga and anime due to how heavily Leiji Matsumoto incorporates pulp space opera into everything he does. Not only directly influenced by it, Matsumoto even has actual pulp credentials as an illustrator for C.L Moore's Shambleau, Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry. The space pirate, while not created in manga and anime, is one of Japan's premier pulp hero archetypes, and Harlock's as good of a baseline to work with as any.

The most popular pulp-inspired works nowadays among teenage or younger audiences are definitely the ones derived from pulp horror, several creators have been getting a lot of mileage these past decades out of plundering and remixing stuff from it. The big ones are Lovecraft and related works like The King in Yellow, but because they soak up all the attention, it also means that people are sleeping on authors like John W. Campbell, William Hope Hogdson, Clark Ashton Smith and Karl Edward Wagner, Nictzin Dyalhis and Olaf Stapledon, and many, many more, which gives you a lot of narrative real estate to work with should you take this direction.

Additionally, one thing that you could consider is that, for a very large portion of the history of pulp fiction, a significant amount of the most popular stories and characters were those that were based on celebrities and real life figures. The biggest of dime novel protagonists was Buffalo Bill, and following him was Nick Carter, a literary equivalent to Eugen Sandow (the Schwarzenegger of his day). Thomas Edison inspired an entire subgenre of dime novel fiction, even Jack the Ripper was a pulp protagonist in Dutch magazines, because sometimes the term "pulp hero" doesn't take the "hero" part much into account.

The precedent for celebrity stories is older than pulp fiction itself, but it was in the dime novels and novelettes and pulps that the idea really found it's footing. The Shadow's exploits took a lot from Gibson's own experiences with Houdini (who himself starred in fictional stories, one famously penned by Lovecraft). Doc Savage was visually modeled after Clark Gable and supposedly inspired on Richard Henry Savage. Eddy Polo, Charlie Chaplin and Tom Mix were the protagonists of several pulps and comic strips across the world, as well as Al Capone (who starred in pulp magazines in Germany and Spain), who fought Nick Carter in a Brazilian story guest-starring Fu Manchu (reportedly based on real figures Sax Rohmer claimed to have met) and Fantomas. Today obviously there are much greater restrictions at play concerning celebrity images, but if dime/pulp magazines were around today, we would have quite possibly seen figures like Keanu Reeves, Tilda Swinton and Lil Nas X either star in their own magazines or be used as models for rising protagonists.

So I guess one other way you could go on about creating a pulp hero, who's either a teenager or appeals to teenagers, would be the route of taking a look at some celebrities that either are, or appeal to those demographics, because if pulp magazines had stayed around unchanged past the 60s and 80s and whatnot you definitely would have seen the likes of David Bowie, Will Smith and Dwayne Johnson get their own magazines. I don't know much about what celebrities are popular with teenagers these days and I'm not about to start caring now, but you could take a look at some icons you like, or liked when you were younger, and think about what made them appealing to think about as characters, and how you could apply that to something closer to a pulp story.

A word of advice would also be that, if you want to make a character inspired by pulp heroes, if you want to create a convincing modern pulp hero, you might want to look less at the pulp heroes themselves and instead those that they were inspired by or working to defy and stand out when compared to. You take the building blocks and rearrange them in a different way. If you have a specific character you want to design yours in reference to, you can send me an ask or a DM about them and I'll dig into my files to give you a few pointers, and what kind of history or cultural predecessors they have that you could take a look at to make something more genuine.

[oddnamesinhistory]

Love the blog! Listen, you should look into a 1920s science fiction writer with the marvelous name of Homer Eon Flint, who died as a result of a betrayal in a Utah bank robbery he carried out. There's also the wonderful Nictzin Dyalhis, one of the most mysterious horror writers, who's name was authentic: his Welsh father was obsessed with all things Aztec.

Wow, yes, that’s perfect; I looked Dyalhis up and there don’t seem to be many sources about the guy, but the two we do have--his WWI draft card and a book by L. Sprague de Camp--agree that he was, legally and originally, Nictzin Wilstone Dyalhis (1873-1942). Others have pointed out that he liked to spell words weird, and since “Nictzin” is a random chunk of an Aztec word meaning “I spread feathers” and the only other “Dyalhis” I can find is the pen-name of a modern fantasy writer, I have my doubts.

[klavier]

Cover of the pulp magazine Weird Tales (December 1937, vol. 30, no. 6) featuring The Sea-Witch by Nictzin Dyalhis. Cover art by Virgil Finlay.

[pulpfest]

WEIRD TALES was never a big money-maker for its publishers. It was, however, a long-lived magazine. It ran for over thirty years. Given its long life, “The Unique Magazine” was bound to engender some competition. The first of these was McFadden’s GHOST STORIES. Its first number was dated July 1926. It ran for 64 issues, ending at the start of 1932. It was not truly a fantasy, horror, or science fiction magazine — more of a “true confessions” type. It featured stories about ghostly encounters, and now and then some honest to goodness fiction. One can even encounter stories by such WEIRD TALES authors as Nictzin Dyalhis, Paul Ernst, Frank Belknap Long, and even Robert E. Howard. The October 1927 issue featuring a cover by an unknown artist is a nice example of GHOST STORIES. https://www.instagram.com/p/ByQr9xOBtuR/?igshid=skulnzer0oqi

[fanlit]

The Sapphire Goddess: The Fantasies of Nictzin Dyalhis: A very fine and long overdue collection. https://t.co/65KQIxfLKq https://t.co/jg7uOE36Fe

[weirdlookindog]

"By the power I hold, I call you forth from your hiding-place of flesh - come ye out!" - Nictzin Dyalhis

Virgil Finlay - The Sea-Witch

(Weird Tales - December 1937)

[hermanwatts]

Men are From Cimmeria, Women are From Earthsea

There has been round of blog posts in the wake of an interview I had at Jared Trueheart’s Legends of Men blog. That interview spurred a response by Jason Ray Carney who disputes that sword and sorcery is man’s fiction. Daniel Davis joined in at his Brain Leakage blog. Jason Ray responded to that. Go read these posts. Jason said that Jared, Daniel, and I were hysterical. You are not subjective when you are the object of comment. Comment if you find where any of us were “hysterical.” Jason states that sword and sorcery is “gender neutral.”

Gender neutrality: Are we talking androgyny, hermaphrodites, eunuchs, or neuters?

Sword and sorcery got its start in Weird Tales magazine with a few stories in its competitors Strange Tales and Strange Stories. I have already written on female readers of Weird Tales push back against Robert E. Howard once the Conan series got rolling. E. Hoffmann Price wrote later in Amra that Conan saved Weird Tales more than once.

Farnsworth Wright knew his readers.

Let us look at some random issues of Weird Tales. September 1932– twelve stories and one poem. Two stories by women and one poem. October 1935– nine stories, three poems; one story by a woman. March 1938– 10 stories, two poems; one story by a woman. So, the average female percentage as writer is around 10%.

Now to the letters section, “The Eyrie,” to get an idea of female readership. August 1932– 12 letters, all from men. March 1934– 3 out of 19 letters by women. September 1938– 3 out of 23 letters by women. So, female readership of Weird Tales hovered somewhere around 12-15%. This is probably a higher percentage than the science fiction magazines of the period.

Weird Tales used Margaret Brundage as the almost exclusive cover artist from 1933-1936. Most of her paintings have nubile, beautiful young women in various stages of undress. Editor Farnsworth Wright who was notoriously nervous about not alienating readers had no problem with art that would be considered offensive today. He must have had an idea of gender breakdown of readers.

The case of C. L. Moore is used as a battle cry as a True Cross for Amazon equality crusaders. I first read about Jirel and C. L. Moore from Avon’s Reader’s Guide to Fantasy in the early 80s. Ace Books did a mass market paperback collection in November 1982. I remember distinctly buying it along with two Fritz Leiber paperbacks in mid-May 1983. Back then, you could go to the local B. Dalton or Waldenbooks and get the paperback Conans, Elric, Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, Kane, some Brak, David C. Smith, and even the Timescape Clark Ashton Smith. I tore in Jirel of Joiry finding “Black God’s Kiss” on the slow side. “Black God’s Shadow” even slower and then just bogging down and scanning through the stories. This past winter, I sat down and reread in detail and it was not a pleasant experience. Moore’s prose is painfully slow and overwritten. Her narrative also had a habit of turning into word salad at crucial scenes.

“Around the dark image a mist was swirling. It was tenuous and real by turns, but gradually she began to make out a ring of figures–girls’ figures, more unreal than a vision–dancing girls who circled the crouching statue with flying fee and tossing hair–girls who turned to Jirel her own face in in as many moods as there were girls. Jirel laughing, Jirel weeping, Jirel convulsed with fury, Jirel honey-sweet, Jirel convulsed with fury, a riot of flashing limbs, a chaos of tears and mirth and all humanity’s moods. The air danced with them in shimmering waves, so that the land was blurred behind them and the image seemed to shiver within itself.”

W.T.F?

There is one scene at the beginning of “Jirel Meets Magic” where Jirel handles a sword. That is it. She deals with adversaries as a vehicle using supernatural third parties. When you look at the plots of the stories, “Black God’s Kiss” is a captivity/kidnapping narrative. It is The Sheik with hallucinogenic passages. “Black God’s Shadow” is the second half of a romance arc. As a friend of mine said, Jirel was treated rough by Guillaume and she liked it. “Jirel Meets Magic” is Alice in Wonderland. “The Dark Land” is another captivity story. “Hellsgarde” is a haunted house story. Moore did not seem comfortable writing scenes of physical combat as I could find only one brief scene with no carnage depicted, just Jirel flailing around with her sword.

There have been three mass market and one trade paperback printings of the Jirel stories, each over a decade apart.  That puts her a notch ahead of reprints of Norvell Page’s “Prester John” series. If Jirel is such an iconic series, why hasn’t the book been in continuously in print? People like the idea of Jirel, many just don’t like reading Jirel.

I was thinking of Moore’s influence through the Jirel series. The only thing that came to mind were two stories by Tanith Lee in the Amazons! Anthologies featuring “Jaisel” that read like homages to Moore. C. L. Moore’s writing style would change. Some stories reprinted in the collection Judgement Night are listed under Moore’s name instead of “Lawrence O’Donnell.” “Paradise Street,” “Heir Apparent,” and her novel Doomsday Morning are written in a stripped-down hard-boiled manner.

CL. Moore was a gracious and lovely lady from what anyone who met her has told me. One friend did tell that in the late 1970s at a science fiction convention, she laughed at the idea she was some sort of feminist icon.

If you add up the writers of sword and sorcery in the 1930s- Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, H. Warner Munn, Nictzin Dyalhis, Clifford Ball, David H. Keller, Seabury Quinn, Henry Kuttner, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, Fritz Leiber, Norvell Page, and C. L. Moore, you come up with a little under 10% female participation rate, a percentage that equals that of Weird Tales and a little under the readership.

There is a type of story found mainly in Planet Stories that is not technically sword and sorcery but has the attitude of it. Poul Anderson’s “Virgin of Valkarion” is Exhibit A. Leigh Brackett was a writer for Planet Stories in the 1940s with a few stories in the 1950s. Her writing style is a cross between Edgar Rice Burroughs and Dashiell Hammett. It is an interesting case of gender ventriloquism. Brackett wrote in a faux-masculine style most of the time. Every now and then the mask would slip as in “All the Colors of the Rainbow.” I can remember sending a Leigh Brackett book to a friend of mine. He returned it unimpressed. He pointed out a fight scene where Brackett had two guys rolling around in the dirt and the emphasis was on how they were getting their clothes dirty instead of physical damage. I can remember the first Brackett I ever read was “The Secret of Sinharat” and being disappointed at the rather tame ending. I was expecting Eric John Stark (aka N’Chaka) was pile up the bodies at the climax. The follow up “People of the Talisman” was more blood and thunder. That was the story that was rewritten by Brackett’s husband, Edmond Hamilton and expanded by 40%. I need to compare the texts someday.

If we look at writers of sword and super-science for Planet Stories, the list includes: Gardner F. Fox, Bryce Walton, Emmett McDowell, Ross Rocklynne, Basil Wells, Erik Fennel, Alfred Coppel, Stanley Mullen, Poul Anderson, and Leigh Brackett. Again, the female participation rate is around 10%.

There were a few sword and sorcery stories that filtered out in the 1950s with E. E. “Doc” Smith, John Brunner, L. Sprague de Camp, and of course Jack Vance. The 1960s gave us Roger Zelazny, John Jakes, Michael Moorcock, Lin Carter, Gardner F. Fox, Ben Haas as “Richard Meade” and “Quinn Reade.” You did have Jane Gaskell’s “Atlan” books shoe horned into the genre. Those are Perils of Pauline type books featuring Cija. They are not very good but always seemed to have great covers whether by Frank Frazetta, Jeff Jones, Boris Vallejo, or James Gurney.

Leigh Brackett could have written a bona fide sword and sorcery story with an antediluvian setting and supernatural elements. Editors would have snapped up anything she wrote. She didn’t but she at least gave us the excellent Skaith trilogy which had its share of physical action.

Sword and sorcery spread out into popular culture starting around 1966 with the paperback books and the Warren magazines. You could buy Frank Frazetta posters at a lot of record stores. Bands like Nazareth were using sword and sorcery imaging on their record album sleeves.

Ted White became editor of Fantastic Stories in 1969. The magazine was a grab-bag of different types of stories. Sword and sorcery did have an increasing presence. White tapped into all sorts of artists talent and you had very traditional sword and sorcery type covers by Jeff Jones, Esteban Maroto, Doug Beekman, and especially Steve Fabian who painted idealized female bodies. Ted White must have known who was buying the magazine.

Ted White knew his readers.

In the middle 1970s, you had the next great female talent, Tanith Lee. I have written on her sword and sorcery when she died. She was unique. I prefer her stories to her novels, but her novels are preferable to much other out there.

Not Sword and Sorcery

Lee showed up in the original sword and sorcery anthologies of the late 1970s. Swords Against Darkness ran for five volumes 1977-1979. It had a total of 57 stories, seven stories and one poem by females for a participation rate of 14%. Heroic Fantasy (D.A.W. Books, 1979) had 17 entries (including some non-fiction pieces), two were by female for a participation rate of 11.7%. Tanith Lee was present in five out of six of those anthologies.

Jessica Amanda Salmonson edited to Amazons! Anthologies (1979 and 1982). Technically, they are not sword and sorcery but amazon anthologies. She was able to invert the 10% number that keeps popping up. Amazons II had 12 stories, three by men so the ratio rose to 25%. Salmonson probably took the series as far as she could though she edited two more anthologies for Ace (Heroic Fantasy).

Marion Zimmer Bradley edited the Sword and Sorceress anthology for D.A.W. Books. It has all the appearance of continuing the idea of Salmonson’s Amazons! But with an in-house writer. The books were not so much sword and sorcery but fantasy of all sorts with a feminist orientation. The first volume had 15 stories, six by men for a 40% participation rate. That would shrink in subsequent volumes. It has a type of fiction that I call “femizon” which split off into its own genre the same way Glen Cook did with military fantasy around the same time.

One last example. My favorite sword and sorcery anthology of the past 10 years is Rogue Blades’ Entertainment’s Return of the Sword. The stories were by amateurs and small press people. It has heart and sincerity. 21 stories by 22 authors, one female for a 4.5% participation rate.

Not Sword and Sorcery

A personal observation: I have known two women personally that like reading Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories. One is mid-50s, the other around 60. One is a pharmacist, the other a nurse that runs a hospital operating room. So, just like the authors, the XX chromosome readers are on the rare side. I think most women are not particularly interested in reading fiction with lots of scenes of intense physical action.

I will give an anecdote that forms opinions. About 15-16 years ago, my office manager’s high school aged daughter read The Lord of the Rings. I thought I would build on that. I lent her one of L. Sprague de Camp’s sword and sorcery anthologies, either Sword & Sorcery or The Spell of Seven. Either of those books are excellent introductions to the genre. She did not like the book as she has problems with the vocabulary. She was constantly going to the dictionary to look up the meaning of words. If you want your kid to score high on the English potion of the S.A.T test, have them read sword and sorcery fiction. Then I lent her Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword. She did not like that at all. It really upset her. Sword and sorcery is not going to pass through the feminine filter of a good portion of the fairer sex.

This came to me this week. A good portion of women like horror especially that more in the Gothic fiction end of the spectrum. Horror light if you will. There might have been an opportunity for a clever editor to sell sword and sorcery disguised as gothic romance to women readers. Phyllis Whitney did have a story in Weird Tales in the 1930s.

Here is a writing exercise of high school or college students. Have them start with a scene of traveler in the woods looking for shelter and finding a manor or castle. See how the story breaks down between the sexes.

So to wrap this up. My friend, the late Steve Tompkins used a phrase ��the exception that proves the rule.” Crunching some numbers swerves that way. The history of sword and sorcery has had a few female outliers who wrote in the genre but the 10-12% rule appears consistent for decades.

Where’s the Sword and Sorcery?

Sword and sorcery fiction may not be totally male, but it skews heavily in the XY chromosome end of the spectrum. Women were not excluded but participation was also for the most not much beyond token entries. I think gender skewed, not gender neutral is a better way to describe the genre. I think editors like Don Wollheim, E. F. Benson, Larry Shaw, and Roy Torgeson were quite happy to pick up a few female readers along the way, but they knew which side their bread was buttered on when publishing sword and sorcery. If the genre is gender neutral, why did the incoming female editors such as Betsy Wollheim at D.A.W. Books and Susan Allison at Ace Books pretty much kill off publishing sword and sorcery? Wouldn’t all the female readers keep it going?  I was there, there was a K-T event in 1985. A few books that were already probably slated made it into the later 1980s, but the genre was decapitated. David Gemmell adapted by writing 300 page + novels with an ensemble cast and lost of domestic goings on but the efficient 60,000 word novel featuring one hero was gone.

This is an example our modern society’s obsession with equalitarianism. De-gendering the genre strikes me as post-modernism. It is also risible. A few weeks ago, an endocrinologist was telling me about hormone supplementation for trans-gendering. The men upon getting estrogen become emotional and weepy. The women getting testosterone develop a sense of humor and are generally less depressed.

I can sympathize with Jason Ray Carney. He teaches at a college. If he were outed that he is interested in what is perceived as masculine fiction, outside of a few sane colleges like Hillsdale or Grove City, he would be hauled up against a tribunal by the commissars for Wrong Think.

Gender Neutral

Men are From Cimmeria, Women are From Earthsea published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[pulpfictionbookstore]

Dark Lore: Five Stories by Nictzin Dyalhis Life after death and the #horror of #eternity www.pulpfictionbook.store https://www.instagram.com/p/Cl4yrMhLeXJ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[vintagegeekculture]

What would you consider to be the easiest way to get into vintage pulp stories? Are the magazines available in reprintings or collected volumes or something like that?

You are absolutely in luck, because in the past three years, it’s become incredibly easy to start reading old pulp stories because of kindle readers. Because publishing for e-readers is a gold rush now and it has very little overhead and zero per-unit cost, publishers are, for the first time, dipping into their back catalogs and even going into public domain materials. Seriously, the past few years are the best time in history to ever be a fan of old pulp fiction. It’s easier to get more old pulp stuff now than even in the 1920s-1950s.

The key thing to remember is this: don’t be afraid of exploring alternate formats. Leigh Brackett’s People of the Talisman is exactly the same, has exactly the same entertainment value, if you buy a vintage pulp magazine at $70 off ebay, than if you buy a $1 ebook or a 50 cent paperback from the 1970s! Remember that lot of pulp scifi was reissued in the 1960s-1980s during the paperback boom, so it’s not unusual to find it in paperback formats, and the thing about paperbacks is, there’s such a glut of them that used booksellers usually clear them off for under a dollar. Pay attention to the following old paperback publishers, because they specialize in reprints: Ace Books, Lancer, DAW (who had the best covers, maybe in paperback history) and Del Rey.

If you want to try kindle or ebooks, the best place to start would be collections of a single author or a single theme, what they call megapacks. It’s not unusual to see them selling for 99 cents or less on Amazon. The covers look very Mickey Mouse, with poser art that make them all seem vaguely like porno or fetish art, but most of the stories are pure gold. It’s possible to buy in bulk. 

If you want to read old pulp scifi, a lot of public domain materials are easily available. It’s possible to buy all 16 John Carter of Mars novels in one go for less than $5 for an e-reader, as is Ray Cummings’ Girl in the Gold Atom, the collected works of Stanley G. Weinbaum, including his best novel, the romance about immortals, The Black Flame. Hell, even Edmond Hamilton’s Captain Future is available in ebook form...where else can you get four novels in one?

If you want to roll the dice, there are even theme packs, with titles like “Golden Age Science Fiction Megapack,” but since most of them cost $1, you’re not gambling much, and they often contain pure gold. Since it’s ridiculously easy to get reprint rights, the ratio of hit to miss is higher than you’d think. 

If you want pulp horror-fantasy, try the ebooks for C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry, about an amazon warrior lady in the middle ages - nearly everything by Moore is available in ebook form for peanuts. There is a great megapack for the oddly named Nictzin Dyalhis, containing everything he ever wrote in Weird Tales. And best of all, the entire life’s work of Abraham Merritt, who is surprisingly readable, including Dwellers in the Mirage, about a legendary world of squid-worshippers hidden behind an illusion, and the Moon Pool, about a portal on a lost island to a weird supernatural world. 

If you want lost-world adventure, Dian of Lost Land, about stone age men riding giant birds in Antarctica, is great, as is Thyra, Romance of the Polar Pit, about a lost kingdom of Vikings discovered by airship explorers. 

But here’s a quick piece of advice if you want to buy public domain e-books. You could save yourself a bit of time by searching for them on Project Gutenberg Australia, where you can get e-books for free. Project Gutenberg makes public domain materials available, but here’s an interesting quirk about copyright law: in the US and Europe, it’s been Life of the Author + 70 years, but in Australia, it’s life + 50. So you will always find more materials on Project Gutenberg Australia. (This is yet another indication of how copyright is totally unworkable in its present form in the internet age, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

[gaslightgallows]

In case you missed it, the new Oddments post went up yesterday! 

In it, I discuss the strange life of Nictzin Dyalhis, a now little-known pulp writer from the Golden Age of Science Fiction who doesn’t appear to have existed before he got married.

Both my spouse and I have male ancestors who just appeared out of nowhere to marry someone, which absolutely no indication of where they came from before they popped up to get hitched, so this sort of thing fascinates me. (None of them were pulp writers, alas.)

I’d love it if you gave it a look!

[swipestream]

Sensor Sweep: Tower of the Elephant, Leigh Brackett, Kenneth Morris, D&D Survey

Writers (Tellers of Weird Tales): Harold S. Farnese didn’t write any stories, poems, or articles for Weird Tales, nor was he a cover artist or illustrator. His eight letters published in “The Eyrie,” the letters column of Weird Tales, failed to land him in the top twenty contributors in that category. You might say that he was a pretty minor figure in the history of the magazine and its contributors. Except for that part where he was so central to a certain understanding of what we call the Cthulhu Mythos. Beyond that, Farnese may have been the first person to adapt a work by H.P. Lovecraft to a form other than verse or prose.

Fiction (John C. Wright): Conan is young here. The internal chronology of the stories is subject to some guesswork. But it is fair to say that this is the second or third tale in Conan’s career, taking place after Frost Giant’s Daughter (1934). We see him for the first time in what will be his signature costume: “naked except for a loin-cloth and his high-strapped sandals.”

I found, as I often do, that not only is Robert E. Howard a better writer than I was able, as a callow youth, to see he was. He also easily surpasses the modern writers attempting to climb his particular dark mountain. From the high peak, brooding, he glares down at inferior writers mocking him, and, coldly, he laughs.

Particularly when Howard is compared with the modern trash that pretends to be fantasy while deconstructing and destroying everything for which the genre stands, he is right to laugh.

Let us list the ways.

Fiction (DMR Books): After covering Barbarian Book Club’s Pre-Tolkien challenge the other day, I figured there’s no reason not to join in. Dunsany and Merritt have been pretty well covered so far, so I wanted to review something lesser known. Nictzin Dyalhis or Clifford Ball would have been perfect, but it would feel too self-serving if I reviewed one of those. So instead I selected “The Regent of the North” by Kenneth Morris, which I first read, appropriately enough, in the anthology Tales Before Tolkien. It’s the best story in the book besides Merritt’s “Woman of the Wood.” Interestingly, editor Douglas A. Anderson doesn’t believe Tolkien ever read either story, but he included them anyway.

  Fiction (Rough Edges): SCARRED FACES is the second novella by Stephen D. Frances featuring Hank Janson (which is also the by-line, of course). In this early tale, Hank is still a traveling cosmetics salesman who just happens to wind up in the middle of violent crimes. This time it’s an acid attack on a beautiful young woman that leaves her dead. Shortly after that, two thugs kidnap Hank and try to take him for a ride because they think he may have seen too much. Of course he escapes, and from there it’s not long until he’s mixed up in a dangerous racket that involves several more beautiful young women, at least one of whom wants Hank dead.

  Fiction (Ringer Files): I read this book while the temperatures outside were pushing the 110 degree mark. The acceptance of global warming, or at least, climate change has most of us wondering what happens to a planet that heats up. This book, written in 1963, takes a look at the flip-side of that theory and sees the world under another ice-age. I picked this up a couple years ago along with several other science fiction novels by Silverberg. I’ve come late to the game in appreciating Robert Silverberg’s science fiction novels. I don’t know how I didn’t read his books when I was in my teens and enjoying Asimov and Clarke and others.

  Fiction (Black Gate): Although Leigh Brackett (1915–1978) wrote planetary adventures during the Golden Age of Science Fiction and was married to Edmond Hamilton, one of the Golden Age’s most praised masters, she seems to, well, bracket the era rather than belong to it. Her stories set on fantastical versions of Mars and Venus are indebted to Edgar Rice Burroughs, while her dark emotional intensity looked forward to New Wave SF of the ‘60s. In his introduction to Martian Quest: The Early Brackett, Michael Moorcock wrote that “It’s readily arguable that without her you would not have gotten anything like the same New Wave … echoes of Leigh can be heard in Delany, Zelazny and that whole school of writers who expanded sf’s limits and left us with some visionary

extravaganzas.”

  Fiction (Lawrence Person): Here’s a book I picked up more for the state and the publisher than the author. Dark Harvest was a very active small press from the early 1980s into the early 1990s. They published primarily horror and science fiction, and did very well with it, but managed to kill themselves off by branching out in mystery.

      Conventions (Western Fictioneers): If there was ever a time when I was especially proud to a member of Western Fictioneers, it was the weekend of our convention in Oklahoma City. Old friends did some catching up, and new friends were made. I lost count of the states represented. (Idaho, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Colorado, California, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, New Mexico, etc.) The discussions were intimate and open, and the session topics were deeply informative, thanks to our many knowledgeable presenters.

Fiction (Paperback Warrior): It’s hard to guess why William Crawford adopted the pseudonym of W.C. Rawford for his 1974 stand-alone western, “Ranger Kirk.” The copyright page says it’s by William Crawford and the book is dedicated to “Robert Gene Crawford, my brother.” Moreover, the pen name of W.C. Rawford isn’t really throwing pseudonym sleuths off the scent. Who was he fooling?

Fiction (Walker’s Retreat): The RPG Pundit put out a video about the survey that Wizards of the Coast recently put out about Dungeons & Dragons. He wasn’t the only one suspecting this. I did too, and seeing that the survey’s cooked to push this meme disease is sufficient confirmation for me to decide to cut WOTC off entirely (and with it, all versions of D&D after Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition).

Gaming (Niche Gamer): Square Enix has shared the first gameplay for the recently announced Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles Remastered Edition.

Featured above, the first gameplay of the game was shown off during this year’s Tokyo Game Show.

Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles Remastered Edition is launching for both PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch sometime next year.

Comic Books (Injustice Gamer): I know there’s the GenCon bit everybody has seen and written about. I just didn’t expect the con to deal itself a deathblow this fast, and that’s all I’ll write here for now.

DC co-publishers Dan Didio and Jim Lee recently did an interview on ICV2 regarding DC’s sales year to year and the industry. Bounding into comics provided a little commentary via numbers, but didn’t go into analysis, instead asking for opinions in the comments section. Didio seems to think the biggest problem is over-saturation of the comics market, while Lee is pointing to declining traffic at Barnes and Noble and waning interest in The Walking Dead.

  Gaming (Table Top Gaming News): I know some of my friends are down at AWA downtown. I’m currently safely at home, grooving to some Sims 4 while I wait for this evening’s D&D session. Gotta go take care of that Strahd murder house, y’all! But I know what you are here for are the reviews I know you so desperately desire. So let’s get to it.

Today we have: Super Mario Bros. Party Card Game, Snow Time, D100 Dungeon, Tower of Madness, The Deck of Many Animated Spells, Kariba, Deities Domination, Seal Team Flix, Nanty Narking, Brass, Yellow & Yangtze, Menara, and Quests of Valeria.

  Sensor Sweep: Tower of the Elephant, Leigh Brackett, Kenneth Morris, D&D Survey published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames