haha im always kinda tempted by the DRAGONLANCE novels cuz theyre so often available at goodwill but ive so far resisted. although there was an r.a. salvatore trilogy in glorious hardcover once that i hemed and hawed abt picking up and didnt and then regretted (there were some p sweet looken spiders on the cover of one) becuz when i went back for them someone else had snatched those right up
i reread the eddings maybe 5 years ago and it was just drippy as hell despite the many other objections it really lacked any conflict or action it was like an epic fantasy series about ants at a picking up or forgetting to pick up yr dry cleaning
― Lamp, Friday, 23 March 2012 23:57 (twelve years ago) link
i have the first paperbook in a weiss & hickman trilogy called THE DARK SWORD or something like that, it was p terrible but i liked the final fantasy 6 magic system
i was hoping for more stuff like the thieves world books are michael scott rohan's 'the sword of winter' trilogy which has some p questionable ideas about race/'savagery' but was p dope
― Lamp, Saturday, 24 March 2012 00:00 (twelve years ago) link
i read not only the weis/hickman dragonlance books but also their seven-book 'the gate cycle' or whatever it was called, i was really into it, somehow i had played a terrible shovelware pointandclick version and found out it was based on SEVEN BOOKS by THE DRAGONLANCE GUYS and i was like mind, blown
i have also read at least one trilogy about drizzt do'urden or whatever he was called
i kind of wonder how much 'our ad&d setting' there stuff was until TSR figured out how to milk that particular cow, though
― thomp, Saturday, 24 March 2012 12:35 (twelve years ago) link
i played the weiss hickman dos RPG also.i also read looooooots of dragonlance books as a kid. lamp i will mail u some when i get them from my dad's attic.
― one dis leads to another (ian), Sunday, 25 March 2012 18:23 (twelve years ago) link
haha thatd be pretty rad actually. i would send you some of thieves' world books but ive become kinda precious about keeping my 'collection' together. i do have piers anthony's incarnations of immortality...
― Lamp, Monday, 26 March 2012 21:00 (twelve years ago) link
wow, Clark Ashton Smith got a volume in the Penguin Classics series this year!http://www.amazon.com/Eidolon-Other-Fantasies-Penguin-Classics/dp/0143107380/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1413647931&sr=8-1&keywords=clark+ashton+smith
― ian, Saturday, 18 October 2014 15:59 (nine years ago) link
I am pretty impressed, good work Penguin.
― ian, Saturday, 18 October 2014 16:00 (nine years ago) link
Got it. Still haven't read it though. It is in the long queue.
― Bobby Ono Bland (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 18 October 2014 16:28 (nine years ago) link
There is another Smith collection around, but without the Joshi scholarship.
― Bobby Ono Bland (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 18 October 2014 17:38 (nine years ago) link
from current I FALL...What Are You Reading thread:
Clark Ashton Smith, The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies - New penguin classics collection so I thought I'd check him out. About six stories in and wishing there was more of this type of stuff, from the back cover: "Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams; I crown me with the million-colored sun/ of Secret worlds incredible, and take/ their trailing skies for vestment when I soar." So far there's been a few too many stories that take place in realistic settings. I think its a chronological survey so maybe he wrote the more cosmic strange stuff when was older?
(also:Anindita Banerjee, We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity - Bit of a slog through the first 30 pages of methodology/theory review, but its starting to pick up, excited to hear more about electric trains connecting st. petersburg and beijing, underground through the himalayas and caspian sea, as imagined by random russians in the mid 19th century.)
― hobbes, Saturday, 4 October 2014 06:26 (2 weeks ago) Permalink
― dow, Saturday, 18 October 2014 18:11 (nine years ago) link
of course edited by s to fucking joshi
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Saturday, 18 October 2014 22:40 (nine years ago) link
Hasn't he got the market cornered?
― Bobby Ono Bland (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 18 October 2014 22:49 (nine years ago) link
well, yes
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Sunday, 19 October 2014 00:34 (nine years ago) link
there have been many smith collections issued over the years. arkham house did some and continue todo some. his poetry & and translations of poetry are available in a complete three volume set. nightshade books issued his collected stories in 5 volumes, but the first two volumes went quickly out of print.
― ian, Sunday, 19 October 2014 02:26 (nine years ago) link
annnyway, i like smith a lot. it's strange how in some types of fiction i have no tolerance for complicated sentences and extraneous description, but i can't get enough of smith.
― ian, Sunday, 19 October 2014 02:29 (nine years ago) link
One I was talking about was The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Asthon Smith
― Thus We Frustrate Kid Charlemagne (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 19 October 2014 02:30 (nine years ago) link
I know exactly what you mean. I used to dismiss all ornate baroque overwriting out of hand, but in recent times I've come to appreciate Jack Vance, who really knows how to do it convincingly.
― Thus We Frustrate Kid Charlemagne (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 19 October 2014 02:36 (nine years ago) link
smith, vance and gene wolfe all do it wonderfully, but they aren't writing crime novels about tough guys.
― ian, Sunday, 19 October 2014 02:40 (nine years ago) link
Still haven't got on the Gene Wolfe bandwagon.
― Thus We Frustrate Kid Charlemagne (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 19 October 2014 03:05 (nine years ago) link
Just pasting something I wrote on the Ligotti forum...
I have the following collections..
Collected Fantasies Of Clark Ashton Smith 1-5Miscellaneous Writings (kind of a 6th volume to the above series)Complete Poetry And Translations 1-3Nostalgia Of The Unknown (prose poetry)Sword Of ZaganRed World Of PolarisBlack Diamonds
I thought that was all the prose and poetry but looking at Internet Speculative Fiction Database, there's a lot more, I think. The contents of the poetry collections haven't been updated yet but it seems like some of his later short stories are only in books like
Strange Shadows: The Uncollected Fiction and Essays of Clark Ashton SmithThe Klarkash-Ton Cycle: Clark Ashton Smith's Cthulhu Mythos Fiction
Can anyone tell me if these are collected in anything else, if they are any good or if they are variants of earlier pieces?
As usual I'm getting ahead of myself, as I've only read a tiny amount of his work
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Wednesday, 22 October 2014 23:39 (nine years ago) link
It's weird but I don't think the complete poetry series collects any prose poetry, which isn't even that much.
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Wednesday, 22 October 2014 23:41 (nine years ago) link
There's a ligotti forum?
― a drug by the name of WORLD WITHOUT END (Jon Lewis), Thursday, 23 October 2014 01:03 (nine years ago) link
http://ligotti.net/
I was hesitant to join at first because I haven't read much Ligotti and am less enthusiastic about forums revolving around one author, but it seems that not everyone there is a Ligotti fan but the attraction is that it's by far the best forum for horror/weird I've seen, also lots of in-depth discussion of philosophy and religion. Lots of poetry too. I've seen some fascinating stuff there.
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Thursday, 23 October 2014 01:38 (nine years ago) link
http://www.openculture.com/2014/10/h-p-lovecrafts-classic-horror-stories-free-online.html
― dow, Thursday, 23 October 2014 17:00 (nine years ago) link
black diamonds and sword of zagan are both pretty plodding reads iirc. i sold my copies... anyway, that's neither here nor there.
but i came to post that the first two volumes of smith's "collected fantasies" are back in print, as paperbacks, in case you're like me and missed out on them before they were selling for $200+
― ian, Monday, 15 February 2016 17:12 (eight years ago) link
Does anyone rate Ashton Smith's poetry? Joshi does, but then he would.
― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, 1 December 2021 10:22 (two years ago) link
C.L. Moore's Jirel ov Joiry is apparently thee earliest (almost only?) sword & sorcery female chop-chop artist---stories I've come across in anthologies are mind-blowing---def. quality over quantity---wiki sums up: Contents (of original s/t collection)"Jirel Meets Magic" (Weird Tales 1935)"Black God's Kiss" (Weird Tales 1934)"Black God's Shadow" (Weird Tales 1934)"The Dark Land" (Weird Tales 1936)"Hellsgarde" (Weird Tales 1939)A sixth story, "Quest of the Starstone", written in collaboration with Henry Kuttner, teamed Jirel with Moore's science fiction hero Northwest Smith. It was finally collected with the other Jirel stories in the 2007 Black God's Kiss.[1][2]
ReceptionAlgis Budrys noted that while the Jirel stories were among Moore's earliest work, they remained effective more than thirty years later because "the events which occur to Jirel, as she struggles with the half-understood forces of darkness in her quasi-medieval world, are all things that play on the heart of what being you and me is all about."[3] Aye, and that includes asskicking.You really can't go wrong with C.L. Moore, it seems, and she had quite a range.
― dow, Wednesday, 1 December 2021 17:12 (two years ago) link
(almost only?) sword & sorcery female chop-chop artist Can't recall having read RAH's Red Sonja stories, though think there's a collection, and a movie.
― dow, Wednesday, 1 December 2021 17:17 (two years ago) link
And I second this, from way upthread: f ya like conan style action sword n sorcery, his Fafhrd & Grey Mouser stories are fun. Also see recent discussion of Jack Vance's sketchy rover Cugel etc., over o the 5000 Posts thread.
― dow, Wednesday, 1 December 2021 20:36 (two years ago) link