#tritonian ring

[geekynerfherder]

'Pony Tail' by Frank Frazetta.

Cover art for the 1968 edition of the novel 'The Tritonian Ring', written by L Sprague de Camp.

[reality-breaker]

Επιλογές Ιανουαρίου (10/1)

Ένα φίλτρο που κάνει ορατές τις αόρατες κινήσεις γύρω μας | Memes και μαγεία στην εποχή των social media και του διαδικτύου | Galeria de Personajes Fantásticos, του Fernando Fernández | The White Wolf, ένα μυθιστόρημα με λυκάνθρωπο από το 1940 | Το άγνωστο πείραμα που φανέρωσε την κβαντική πραγματικότητα | Γραφομηχανή τσέπης από το 1952 | Η σημαντικότητα των «παραισθήσεων» που έχουν οι τεχνητές νοημοσύνες | Πώς μπορείς να γίνεις ανώνυμος στο διαδίκτυο | Llarn του Gardner F. Fox | Σύγκριση Robert E. Howard και Fritz Leiber | Zimiamvia του E.R. Eddison | Ιστορικοί λόγοι για πραγματικές μονομαχίες | Nicolas Bournay | Το σενάριο για το At the Mountains of Madness (Gullermo del Tor και Matthew Robbins) | Η τέχνη του Mr Zarono | The Tritonian Ring, του de Camp | Φολκλόρ, ξωτικά, και «παράξενα» μανιτάρια | Τα έργα (βιβλία, ταινίες) που θα μπουν στο public domain το 2024 | Pascal Blanché | Paolo Barbieri

➤ https://www.fantastikosorizontas.gr/kostasvoulazeris/epiloges/ep.php?ID=01_2024#1

[simowis]

Monthly nonsense 23.7

element zero and mass relay have make mass effect a unique sci-fi game. However it doesn’t means other sci-fi’s element can’t be used in ME fanfics. Which will add a lot of space to image, perfect

And I'm getting better at reading his microexpressions, and he has a lot of them

Does prothean have a Dyson ball?

prothean is like a weakened version of the triton

what‘s the hight of Javik?

seems tumblr ME fans like the emotional javik?

Was the design of the prothean, which is perceptive and strong and has four sharp teeth in the upper jaw, inspired by snakes? Could the primitive prothean have bitten its prey to inject venom and then dragged it back to its nest to slowly suck blood? I can't stop thinking about it.

The markings on the back of javik's head are just too much like a blue ringed octopus. How poison could prothean be! Do they Interracial Sexualizer REALLLY want to kiss Javik unprotected??? Emm..yes….

Can't stop imagining Javik squeezing venom out of his teeth every day and loading it into special bullet casings …… Saliva sticking to the mouth of the bottle…so horny…too much head canon!

JUST CAN'T STOP! Not objective, not correct, OOC, too erotic!

I'm still in shock Javik's smile was very rare and fleeting. He smiled just a few times in all. When the first conversation in Normandy, he had smiled briefly when he thought there may be survivors in Ilos and when he recounted his original mission. He had smiled sadly when he spoke to the Prothean VI in Thessia; he had smiled when he gave the echo shard to the Shep before the final battle. His fleeting smile always holds a lot of weight. And he actually comment with SMILE AFTER HE SLEPT WITH SHEP! I'm shocked.

What's Daily news like in prothean's society?

Javik being Catalyst was such a bad idea, good thing they changed it

How can he speak so calmly while having so many sad micro-expressions

its not a ME thought, but I wonder what’s Javik comment on Dragonball’s alien characters…

just so happy to see he smile, a pity he don't smile in game often. This makes me want to give him a happy future even more, maybe, in my story, future...

I think the prothean society described by liara might not conflict with what javik said

How difference in appearance between two prothean? In Javik’s memory there was only color and voice and the spot maybe, they even have the same height! There have to be more differences

Shep’s personality is too flat and not growing, only fanfics give him/her some kinds of explanations. I may have a different shep in my story

ME’s AI is too human like, EDI and Gess, just like human talking machine language, not like Galactic Empire Series which Ai has rules and different logic, Sense of heterogeneity, multiple angles. It’s hard I know

----

The main differences between prothean and tritonians are: The prothean do not live in a harsh environment and have scarce resources unlike the triton The prothean do not have a completely transparent mind like the triton, they still need to touch and smell to understand perceptual thinking, which is why I consider them to be a weakened triton Protheans do not inherit knowledge from birth like tritons, they still need to learn, although they may learn quickly through touch and echo shard. protheans can also forget memories.That's why the living span of a triton is thus probably infinite. Whereas Javik apparently mentions that the life span of prothean is finite

----

If prothean is sharing memories while mating ……ahhh

Has prothean ever engaged in class division as well as breeding control? The best people are entitled to leave offspring and all that?

The prothean must have been technologically advanced in biology because they worshipped the theory of the underdog and they were not averse to experimenting on primitive asari

I wish I could get javik to learn how to play chess

Just found Javik's eight pupils can look in four different directions.

-

What is the ecology of Prothean's home planet? At least given his bipedal form, his planet's gravity shouldn't be too far off from Earth's.They may have once been aquatic, and if they can detect a spectrum of light other than natural light, this could also explain their gill-like throats. They may have had webbing between their toes in the past. Or perhaps they are terrestrial creatures, but the planet's thin atmosphere cannot absorb most of the ultraviolet light.

If they were perhaps ever able to fly, the atmospheric pressure of their planet would have been not insignificant, as wings of this size would have been difficult to drive a body of the Collector's stature and mass on Earth.

-

Does prothean have a temperature sensing system?

Have the remains of a defeated Sovereign not been studied? Do they really just treat everything as a gess rebellion?

With Javik's eyes, there is usually an expression on one side and none on the other (the eyes are always wide open), except when emotionally aroused when there is an expression on both sides together. I wonder if the half of their brain that controls their emotions only controls half of their eyes?

his face is a bit like Mickle Jackson!

Finally, both geth and EDI have a soul because of the code of HARVEST. And HARVEST, from ORGANIC

What if ME's amino and dextro-amino are thought to be designed? Because in reality humans can eat dextro-amino acids and the prothean appears to be unrestricted

what if Javik was waked by human (even Cerberus)BEFORE the reapers invade? Human will become a giant empire! He will help human a lot, to prevent reapers, to find his people exist possibility.

Ever notice the line 'More of my people survived?' It even looks a bit ridiculous to see the way his lips switch rapidly between smile and displeasure, but that's the struggle of being in despair when he's holding on to hope..

What's the hole in his head under the carapace for?

What's prothean's skull like?

I wonder what javik would think if he smelled what Shepard is thinking: that prothean really is the right bed partner...

Is prothean a democracy? Or a democratic republic? Or a hegemony? Or an imperial system? What is their authority like, AVATARS?

I don't remember javik ever refusing to let shepard ask him a question.

Think about it, if Javik had originally planned for all the races he led in this cycle to fight the reapers and your race refused. Then in his mind, you are the husk that will be manipulated by the Reapers in the future, and then even exterminating you now would be a way to reduce the threat in the future. Don't forget that Javik's mission has always been to fight the Reapers, and he is completely ruthless about it. But he's just saying, let your race face the reapers on its own. Very merciful. Indeed.

[snuh]

Vincent di Fate: The Tritonian Ring - Del Rey/Ballantine #25803, March 1977

[deepdarkspaceblog]

The Tritonian Ring

[ananta108]

Vincent Di Fate - The Tritonian Ring

[raypunkzero]

Frank Frazetta (1928 - 2010) Pony Tail, The Tritonian Ring Paperback Cover Art (Paperback Library, 1967) https://ift.tt/2OeRQUW November 24, 2019 at 11:05PM +visit our fellow Goethepunk art page

[phantastische-illustrationen]

The Tritonian Ring (Illustrator Vincent di Fate)

[infactforgetthepark]

[Free eBook] The Best of L. Sprague de Camp [Vintage SF/Fantasy, Poetry, Essays]

The Best of L. Sprague de Camp by the late L. Sprague de Camp, a recipient of multiple honours including the SFWA Grand Master and World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, is a collection of assorted fiction and non-fiction works, free for a limited time courtesy of publisher Phoenix Pick Press.

This is their featured Free Book of the Month offer for January, and was originally published in 1978 as a selection of the Science Fiction Book Club, as well as part of Del Rey's Ballantine's Classic Library of Science Fiction line. There's also a tie-in sale offer for a number of his other classic works at a significant discount.

The collection contains a mix of science fiction and fantasy short stories, as well as some poetry and essays, and has an introduction by fellow SFWA Grand Master, the late Poul Anderson.

Offered DRM-free worldwide through probably Monday, January 31st (the freebie typically rotates on the first Tuesday of each month), available from the publisher's website.

Currently free @ the publisher's dedicated promo page (DRM-free ePub & Mobi bundle; follow the instructions on the page to reset the suggested cart price to $0.00)

The tie-in offer is for an assortment of up to 9 backlist reprints, available either separately, or in a money-saving bundle for just $19.99 for the lot, which is a bargain at just over $2 per book (regularly around $6-7).

This includes the seminal 1941 time-travel classic, Lest Darkness Fall (in an edition including some follow-up shorts and essays written by other authors), the 5 non-sfnal historical fiction novels set in ancient Greece (based on real life incidents, with notes in the back), the 1952 retro-futuristic science fiction novel The Glory That Was (with an introduction by the late fellow SFWA Grand Master Robert A. Heinlein, the 1953 adventure fantasy collection The Tritonian Ring set in a Conan-esque world called Pusadia, and the groundbreaking 1951 science fiction novel Rogue Queen, one of the earlier sfnal works to deal openly with themes of sexual and gender roles.

(NB: you may already have the 5 historical novels from a long-ago tie-in offer when the first book was offered free, and Rogue Queen and The Glory That Was have been in another tie-in bundle and Lest Darkness Fall has also been a featured freebie, but The Tritonian Ring has apparently only been on sale once before in a separate offer.)

Description A science fiction collection by one of the all-time greats of science fiction, L. Sprague de Camp. These stories and poems exemplify de Camp’s unique outlook on life and mankind and are told with a quiet but sharp irony that became his trademark. Bold, inventive and humorous, this collection is a must for fans of the writer.

[hermanwatts]

L. Sprague de Camp’s “Pusad” Series

This is a guest blog post from Richard who has contributed a few items over the years. I looked at L. Sprague de Camp’s “The Stronger Spell” a few weeks back. Richard has recently read or re-read the stories in the series and has an opinion:

L. Sprague de Camp’s discovery of heroic fantasy through reading Gnome’s CONAN THE CONQUEROR in 1950 had two distinct consequences. The first was of course the Gollum like pursuit of his precious Cimmerian loot, an endeavour which would keep him happily occupied for the rest of his days. But the second was the inexplicable urge to write something of his own in the same vein. I say inexplicable because nothing in either his character or his previous work advocated itself to an artistic expression of that nature. The result, as Morgan has already explained in a previous post, was THE TRITONIAN RING and the smattering of related Pusâdian stories which he published in various periodicals during the 1950s, with a couple of belated additions appearing twenty years later during the sword and sorcery revival of the mid 1970s. The novel has been much reprinted over the years but the short stories have hitherto never been collected. It isn’t particularly difficult to understand why. Simply put they are god-awful.

The only reason the stories remain relatively easily available to read is because De Camp’s obliging old cohort Lin Carter demonstrated an indefensible fondness for them and conserved four of the travesties in the otherwise admirable series of fantasy anthologies he compiled throughout the 1970s. The lame humour and daft and doddering characters found therein being very much in keeping with Carter’s own inane brand of fantasy.

   Each one of the stories is a shambolic mishmash of absurd and contrived situations, slapstick action – pole-vaulting with pikestaffs for example – inconsistency, coincidence and self-contradiction, all undertaken in the company of a cast of dim, venal and unsympathetic characters; all of whom incidentally are either con-men, chancers or charlatans. The urge to debunk prevailing notions appears to have been so  deeply ingrained in De Camp’s nature that he was incapable of treating heroism seriously even in fiction.  For him the hero might well wear a thousand faces but he only ever had the one pair of feet and they were made of clay.

      The Pusâd stories centre mostly around the antics and misadventures of two different characters, a workshy court magician called Derezeng Tâsh and a wandering huckster named Gezun Lorska. Gezun is ostensibly the Conan surrogate for the series but a Conan reflected in the distorted mirror of De Camp’s own scepticism. So even though Gezun looks the part he is a hollow effigy of a hero; one with Conan’s craftiness, belligerence and rude ethics substituted with gormlessness, ineptitude and cowardice. Gezun occupies his time by attempting to fleece the gullible, impregnating love struck women or fleeing from his creditors, all the while essaying a blithe deluded optimism that would put even Mr Micawber to shame.

Gezun is a character so stupid that he snoops on another man’s mail even though he is unable to read and so deluded that he believes a haircut renders him unrecognisable in a hostile city where he towers head and shoulders over the natives. De Camp clearly intended these character defects to be the endearing affectations of an amiable oaf. But they aren’t remotely endearing and are instead relentlessly irritating. Gezun is one of those characters whose exploits one follows in the fervent hope of seeing him beaten to a pulp at some point.

But societies breed the heroes they deserve and on the evidence De Camp provides the Pusâdian world appears to be entirely populated by imbeciles. In the story “The Eye of Tandyla” a duplicitous royal consort cannot recognise the famous jewel of the title even though it is found in her homeland and she is the one who has connived to have it stolen. In the same story sentries are lured away from guarding regalia by someone pretending to strangle themselves. In “Ka the Appalling” an entire city is duped into believing a hitherto unknown god is returning to the world by the excavation of a fabricated prophecy.

Clearly, whatever their inspiration, these are not slavish imitations of Robert E Howard and equally evident is the fact that De Camp had no intention of them being taken very seriously. But even qualifications of this sort do not excuse how badly written the stories are. The plots are farcical and crudely constructed, the fight scenes risible with swords literally going “Clang! Clang!”, while the texts are replete with cod archaisms and facetious word usages like “bronzen” and “coolth”. Rather than convey the intended sense of antiquity contrived language of this sort merely feeds the impression of a writer for whom English is a second and uncomfortable tongue.

And what on earth is one supposed to make of clumsy metaphors of this ilk:

“The cold in the room was as if an iceberg had walked in….”

Er; I hate to have to break it to you, Sprague old son, but…..

The irksome thing is that if Howard had ever generated such a crude example of ham-fisted prose De Camp would have been the first to seize upon it as further evidence of Howard’s supposed haste and carelessness and slapdash style, all of which he was wont to do in his sweeping Olympian judgements upon Howard’s perceived deficiencies.

Credibility and consistency, both qualities De Camp prided himself upon, are in strangely short supply in these efforts. Take the rings forged from meteorites for instance which act as sorcery repellents in the Pusâdian world: artefacts so scarce and potent according to one story that they are the preserve of kings, but in another so innocuous and commonplace apparently that the magician Sancheth Sar can afford to gift a spare to a slave boy.  In the story “The Owl and the Ape” we are asked to swallow the idea that a building project could be commissioned purely in order to distract a passing Gezun so that his pocket can be picked. And don’t ask me to explain why a cannibal should choose to take up residence in a ruined wizard’s tower. Or how the cul-de-sac Gezun flees down just happens to have a secret tunnel required for him to escape a hostile mob. Artifice and contrivance of this sort abounds in the series and each instance seems to trump its predecessor in preposterousness.

Perhaps none of this would matter very much if even one of the stories was half as witty and amusing as De Camp believed them to be. But with the exception of some acerbic laughs provided by ancillary characters such as King Vuar’s most insolent page the supposed humour is forced, flat and feeble. Never more so than when Gezun’s personality is transferred into the body of a bull with predictably slapstick consequences.

When all is said and done the Pusâd stories amount to little more than a silly and inconsequential footnote in the development of modern fantasy. But for anyone with an interest in understanding why the De Camp/Carter Conan compotes are quite so indigestible then herein may be found their stewed ingredients.

L. Sprague de Camp’s “Pusad” Series published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[swipestream]

Conan and the Critic

It is an eerie thing to reread the half-forgotten stories treasured in one’s youth. For better or worse, the hold haunts never look the same. The worse happens when eyes grown cynical with age will see tinsel and rubbish where once glamor gleamed as fresh and expectant as the sunrise in the Garden of Eden. And, to the contrary, the better happens when one discovers added layers of wonder, or deeper thoughts to savor, than a schoolboy’s brain can hold.

So I decided to read, in their order of publication, the Conan stories of Robert E Howard. I was not a devout fan of Conan in my youth, so some stories I had read before, others were new. But in each case I was surprised, nay, I was shocked, at how much better they were than I recalled.

In this space, time permitting, I hope to review each tale as I read it, starting with Phoenix on the Sword. But before any review talks about what Conan is, let me tell the candid reader what Conan is not.

As with HP Lovecraft’s spooky tales or with the adventure yarns of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the unwary reader often confuses the popularized and simplified versions of iconic characters, Cthulhu or Tarzan, with the character as first he appeared in the pages of a pulp magazine. Tropes now commonplace, endlessly copied, at the time were stark and startling and one-of-a-kind.

The original character who is later taken into a franchise or revised for comic books, film and television, or who is copied or reincarnated by the sincere flattery of lesser talents, is inevitably more raw and real than such dim Xeroxes of Xeroxes. These franchise writers, imitators, and epigones rarely do justice to the tale they copy, some, for whatever reason, do grave injustice.

And, of course, certain writers of modest talent and no memorable accomplishment delight to assume the pen and mantle of the art critics and connoisseur in order to diminish the stature of author they cannot match. They do a deliberate injustice to iconic characters, and further muddy the perception.

Here, for example, is a quote from the loathsome Damon Knight. If the reader is surprised I use so harsh a word for this well-known figure in science fiction, please reflect that he is not well known for any creative writing, only for his ludicrous claim to be a critic:

The Coming of Conan, by Robert E. Howard, is of interest to Howard enthusiasts, who will treasure it no matter what anyone says, and to students who may find it, as I do, an intriguing companion piece to L. Sprague de Camp’s The Tritonian Ring.  Howard’s tales lack the de Camp verisimilitude – Howard never tried, or never tried intelligently, to give his preposterous saga the ring of truth – but they have something that de Camp’s stories lack; a vividness, a color, a dream-dust sparkle, even when they’re most insulting to the rational mind.

Howard had the maniac’s advantage of believing whatever he wrote; de Camp is too wise to believe wholeheartedly in anything.

This book contains the only fragment of a Conan story that I remember from Weird Tales – Conan tippy-toeing along a ledge with a naked girl held by the hair, and then dropping her carefully into a cesspool – which turns out to be neither as isolated nor as insignificant as I had supposed.  Another naked lady friend of the hero’s, in another episode, winds up hanged to a yardarm with a rope of jewels; and for that matter, hardly anyone, man or woman, squeaks through the Conan saga without some similar punishment, except Conan himself.

All the great fantasies, I suppose, have been written by emotionally crippled men.  Howard was a recluse and a man so morbidly attached to his mother that when she died he committed suicide; Lovecraft had enough phobias and eccentricities for nine; Merritt was chinless, bald and shaped like a shmoo.  The trouble with Conan is that the human race never has produced and never could produce such a man, and sane writers know it; therefore the sick writers have a monopoly of him.

  It would be a tedious task indeed to wade through this mass of sticky and malodorous bullshit to rebut each sly insinuation and answer each peevish insult as it deserves.

We need not dwell long here in the chamberpot of Mr. Knight’s performance as a critic. I am content with noting that there is not a word of actual criticism anywhere in the passage. It is merely a stream of insults against Robert E Howard, calling him everything from unintelligent to maniacal to emotionally crippled to sick, with occasional flippant insults against Mr. Howard’s fans and admirers, not to mention studied insults against other luminaries of the field.

(So is the candid reader to dismiss unread THE MOON POOL and SEVEN FOOTPRINTS TO SATAN and THE SHIP OF ISHTAR, which were seminal works of science fiction and fantasy, on the grounds that the author thereof was chinless and bald and shaped like a shmoo? Is the reader not to judge the work of Homer and Virgil and Milton until the details of their jawlines and coiffeurs are known?)

When Mr. Knight dismisses Conan as someone who does not exist, he betrays a faulty understanding of what writing fiction is about. This disqualifies him from his pretense of being critic.

Fiction writers are not newspapermen nor are we scientists, attempting dispassionately to portray the world as it is. All art is abstraction and exaggeration. The pen both ornaments reality and pares away distractions, to hone things down to their essentials. Adventure yarns contain romantic characters, that is, larger than life heroes and villains, meant to embody ideals and archetypes. The things are writ large to bring to our weak eyes what might otherwise escape us.

Just as characters in a horror story act more frightened and more helpless than real people would, those in heroic tales act more bold and forthright. This is because that is what the story is about. It is what story telling is. Stories are about the things in which we believe.

In scoffing that the truly wise believe wholeheartedly in nothing at all, Mr. Knight further disqualifies himself. He is no fit critic. I doubt he a fit member of the human race. The comment is either rank hypocrisy or a grotesque self confession.

Mr. Knight’s trick of merely asserting, without proof and without honesty, the shortcomings in the inner heart of a man he never met is a simple game, and anyone can play it. For example, a hypothetical unscrupulous commenter could claim that what Mr. Knight’s crooked comments betray about Mr. Knight’s own masculinity, when he so unconvincingly dismisses as unreadable the portrayal of a romanticized yet savage fighting-man like Conan, a figure of rugged proportions and gigantic passions, as some sort of impossible and unrealistic product of sickmindedness, is too obvious to bear repeating. The gelding hates the virile.

Does he likewise dismiss the portrayals of Achilles, Aeneas, Roland, Beowulf, Zorro, or any other man of action from myth, history, or story? No?

For another example, were a hypothetical commenter to play his game, he might loftily assert that one need make no comment about Mr. Knight’s obsession with a naked woman being dunked in a cesspool, which is, tellingly, the only fragment Mr. Knight remembers from a tale he read in the magazine. It is something only an sexually deviant mind would sees as interrelated. That another woman in another story is hanged as a pirate, or that other men and women in adventure stories suffer hardships, goes beyond merely being dishonest, smarmy and slimy rhetoric. It is an unwitting self confession. The neurotic invariably accuse others of his own neuroses.

Such things would be easy enough to write, were our hypothetical commenter to be as unfair to him, as Mr. Knight was to Mr. Howard.

Lest we be accused of unfairness, let us must amend the harsh statement above that no one remembers Mr. Knight’s failed fiction career. After herculean effort, I was indeed able to bring to mind a single story written by Mr. Knight: a short story called ‘To Serve Man’ made into a respectable episode of Rod Serling’s TWILIGHT ZONE, and parodied in THE SIMPSONS. It is, of course, a shaggy dog story, whose sole twist is based on a pun in English, which for some reason is the same language in which the space aliens write their cookbooks. There is not even the smallest trace of plot present, nor any memorable character, human or alien, nor any real science fictional speculation. It is basically a campfire tale a boy scout might tell to spook his fellow campers. One would think a man whose sole contribution to the art of criticism was obsequious love letters to authors he wishes to magnify or verminous libels against authors he seeks to demean would have attempted more serious craftsmanship.

The sad thing is that such character assassinations need only score a glancing blow to do their work. Even if the honest reader is disgusted that creatures like Mr. Knight are willing to libel a skilled author who commits suicide, and is appalled that Mr. Knight would spit on a man’s good grave merely in order to mock his work, and even if this reader thinks Mr. Knight is overstating the case, rare indeed is the reader able to see that the whole thing is false from stem to stern. We give even liars the benefit of the doubt. We assume there is a grain of truth beneath the libels.

Such a reader is likely to absorb, unquestioned, in his unconscious mind the impression that Conan is a simplistic figure from a boy’s adventure yarn, a caricature of schoolboy dream-dust, unintelligently portrayed, a guilty pleasure at best. None dare to admit he is one’s favorite character, and, even if beloved, none will say Conan is to be taken seriously. After all, the wise man believes nothing, does he not?

Such a reader will picture Conan as a man in a bearskin loincloth, inarticulate, grimacing, with a shapely dancing girl clutching his knee while he cleaves the skull of a devil-beast or giant snake with a bloody ax.

That reader will be as surprised as I was on rereading these tales, particularly the earlier ones from 1933.

In the first Conan tale, Phoenix on the Sword, Conan is the king of a turbulent but rich and powerful nation, facing a conspiracy of embittered and ambitious nobles, weary of the burdens of rulership, and, in the fight scene, he is properly accoutered in cuirass, with shield and plumed casque near at hand.

The sole mention of any dancing girls, clothed or not, is when Prospero, the king Conan’s advisor, is cautioned to be on seemly behavior when visiting the court of king Numa.

However, Conan does cleave skulls, of men and devil-beast alike.

The reader is like to be surprised at this first tale at how badly untrue are critic’s dismissals of Conan as unintelligent, dreamlike, unreal, et cetera et ad nauseum.

The setting and tone in Phoenix on the Sword, are grim, the theme is trenchant, particular in the era when it was written, in the island years of peace between two world wars.

Both the background world and the foreground characters are expertly drawn is a few bold and simple lines, and both Conan’s world and Conan’s brooding figure continue to loom in the imagination, eighty-four years and counting since the time he stepped forth, brooding, blue-eyed and black-haired, melancholic, stark, huge and terrible, larger than life in the pages of Weird Tales.

But a proper review deserves its own column.

  Conan and the Critic published first on http://ift.tt/2zdiasi

[snuh]

Vincent di Fate: The Tritonian Ring - Del Rey/Ballantine #25803, March 1977

[hermanwatts]

The Stronger Spell

        L. Sprague de Camp was part of the small second wave of sword and sorcery fiction from the early 1950s that included Poul Anderson and Jack Vance. He used to include himself as a pioneer of the genre in the introductions to the Lancer Books Conan paperbacks citing his Harold Shea stories with Fletcher Pratt. I do not consider the Harold Shea stories to be sword and sorcery. They are more Bewitched than Robert E. Howard.

     De Camp was bitten with sword and sorcery after reading the Gnome Press edition of Robert E. Howard’s “Hour of the Dragon” published as Conan the Conqueror. He was so taken with the idea that he created his own Hyborian Age, the Pusadian Age. De Camp came up with a good world centered on the Tartessian Empire in what is now Spain. He had Pusad, a remaining portion of the partially sunken continent of Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean along with some other smaller island chains.

The novel “The Tritonian Ring” was the first appearance in Two Complete Science-Adventure Books from Winter 1951. Two more stories quickly followed in 1951.

De Camp placed the Pusad stories in just about any magazine he could submit to: Fantastic Adventures, Fantasy Fiction, Imagination, Universe Science Fiction, Fantastic Universe.

“The Stronger Spell” was the fourth story with the setting. It appeared the same year in Fantasy  Fiction, November 1953. Fantasy Magazine/Fiction was one of those attempts to bring back Unknown/Unknown Worlds. It last for only four issues like other attempts to do an Unknown type magazine. Critics and editors like the idea of Unknown, readers do not.  The story also was included in the Twayne hardback collection The Tritonian Ring in 1953.

“The Stronger Spell” features Suar Peial, a bard and swordsman. He sees an attempted robbery and intervenes to foil it. Ghw Gleokh, the intended victim, joins Suar’s invitation to join him at a tavern where he will sing.

The story proceeds at the right pace with more characters introduced in the tavern. The story rapidly reaches a climax when a magician and his apprentice demand Ghw hand over a weapon he has invented. Words are exchanged, the magician’s apprentice begins an incantation that Ghw cuts short by blowing him a way with a crude firearm. The magician gets a spell in before Ghw can deal with him. The spell kills Ghw Gleokh before Suar dispatches the magician. The story ends with Suar’s friend, Midawan throwing the proto-gun into the sea.

The story borders hanging on a gimmick, but de Camp infuses the story with enough background and interesting characters to make it rise above. Suar Peial is an interesting enough character that one wonders if de Camp had thought of making him a series character. Perhaps the dearth of markets for fantasy in the 1950s prevented that. I have enjoyed the Pusad stories for what they are and wish de Camp had written more.

Roy Krenkel magazine interior illustration.

Another possibility is that de Camp simply did not have plot ideas. It has been pointed out that de Camp started out strong with his series, but they lost momentum and petered out. I can remember Glenn Lord telling me that de Campy had the Conan fragment that became “The Hand of Nergal” when finished by Lin Carter. De Camp could write a Conan story if he had an outline left behind by Robert E. Howard but could not write one on his own.

The Pusad Age is put together well enough that it would have been interesting to invite other writers to participate in the world.  I could see Harry Turtledove for example writing a Pusad story. I just reread Henry Kuttner’s “Elak of Atlantis” stories last week and Kuttner’s world building is very faulty in comparison to L. Sprague de Camp.

You can get “The Stronger Spell” in the Gollancz omnibus of Lest Darkness Fall, Rogue Queen, The Tritonian Ring. I just saw a copy at Half-Price Books today.

The Stronger Spell published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/