SAGA Entry 2: Poul Anderson

An American author of Scandinavian descent, Poul Anderson was a giant in the genre of 20th century science fiction. These two hugely influential sword and sorcery novels earned him a place in the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA).

The Broken Sword (1954) is a strangely paced tale that entwines fairy-tale style elves and trolls with historical Vikings and Anglo Saxons. Taking its cue from the Norse sagas, it tells of the son of Orm the Strong who is replaced in his crib by a changeling who grows up to be a doom-bringer to all his people. Orm's real son is raised by the elves as 'Skafloc'. There is also the matter of the titular broken sword - a theme present in the Norse sagas and also used by Tolkien (who's first volume in the Lord of the Rings trilogy was published the same year).

Three Hearts and Three Lions (1961) was based on Anderson's novella printed in Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1953. Starting in wartime Europe, Danish resistance fighter Holger Carlsen - in true Burroughsian fashion - is sent hurtling through space and time by an explosion and winds up in another world. This pseudo-medieval world is under siege by the evil of 'Faerie' and Carlsen (who now goes by 'Ogier the Dane') discovers that this is where he is most at home.

Both books are essential reading in the sword and sorcery genre, not least for their influence on other writers. Michael Moorcock has credited The Broken Sword as a major inspiration in writing his Elric tales and the alignment of creatures and characters into the groups of 'law' and 'chaos' as shown in Three Hearts and Three Lions was used in the game system of Dungeons and Dragons the following decade.

'Rosemary's Baby' by Ira Levin

Happy Halloween folks! As the great festival for all things creepy, spooky and demonic is this Sabbath, I will be putting out several posts over the next few days celebrating the spirit(s) of All Hallows' Eve. First up; a remarkable novel which played a large part in the popular shift towards all things occult and satanic in the late '60s and early '70s.

Popular culture in the late '60s was vastly becoming obsessed with the demonic. Anton LaVey founded The Church of Satan in 1966. Rosemary's Baby was published the following year and the film adaption came the year after that. The early '70s saw the huge success of novels and movies like The Exorcist and The Omen, as well as more low budget stuff like Hammer's The Devil Rides Out and To the Devil a Daughter. The big bad man downstairs was everywhere it seemed, popping up on magazine covers, paperbacks and movie posters. The cause for a lot of it can be laid at the door of Rosemary's Baby and Roman Polanski's near perfect 1968 film adaptation.

Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse move into an old apartment block in New York City. Rosemary wants a baby and Guy is an out of work actor. They get friendly with an elderly couple living in a neighboring apartment and after the mysterious death of a fellow actor, Guy's career suddenly soars. Rosemary soon gets pregnant and that's when things start to get creepy. Horrific dreams plague Rosemary as the new life grows inside her and she becomes convinced that their friendly neighbors are intent on stealing her baby.

The book is less supernatural horror than paranoid thriller and is all the more effective for it. The terror of a mother for her unborn child and the sense that she can trust nobody - not even her own husband - is the real horror at the centre of the story. The comparison on the back to Henry James' The Turn of the Screw is one I can agree with - it is never clear until the very end whether or not it is all just some horrible paranoid fantasy on the part of the protagonist. What's really creepy is just how ordinary the villains are. There are no crimson cloaks, black masses or naked dancing in the moonlight here. Just a group of elderly people who wouldn't be out of place in any neighborhood. They could be living next door to you or I.

Clive Barker's 'Books of Blood' Vols. 4 - 6

Having read The Hellbound Heart and thoroughly enjoyed Clive Barker's self-directed film adaption, I began poking around in second hand bookshops for his fabled 'Books of Blood' anthologies. That's why I only have this second collection (volumes 4 - 6) and not the first.

I'll admit that it took me a while to get into his short stories. The first two entries in this book didn't really do anything for me and I was gradually coming to the conclusion that perhaps (other than The Hellbound Heart) Barker wasn't for me. But in a fit of stubbornness, I picked it up again and read the third story and got really hooked.

The great thing about Barker's work is that it is totally unclassifiable. Breaking away from the restrictions of various horror sub-genres, his imagination is seemingly endlessly original. There isn't one story here that I could sum up in a couple of words and that is probably what gave me a hard time getting into the book to begin with. It's impossible to predict what one might get when starting on a Barker story. But if you allow your mind to be opened up enough by a couple of brushes with Barker, it should be ready for the truly bizarre.

Not all of the surreal ambiguity worked for me though and while several of the stories are off-beat enough to be truly original and entertaining, a few of them were so far out that they had me wondering exactly what the hell was going on.

On the other hand, real highlights for me were Revelations - a great tale of murder and ghosts in a run down motel, Down, Satan! - an exploration of a totally mad and demonic mind, The Forbidden - which inspired the movie Candyman (1992) and the wonderfully morbid The Life of Death. Gore is never something to be shied away from by Mr. Barker and stuff like How Spoilers Bleed had me literally squirming with discomfort - always an interesting experience for one who considers himself pretty much desensitised by exposure to too many horror books and movies.

SAGA Entry 1 - 'The Door into Fire' by Diane Duane

Sword and sorcery fiction has had a rough time of it since its rise to prominence in the pulp magazines of the 20s and 30s. The works of the likes of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner fell into obscurity as the pulp magazine vanished due to wartime paper shortages. After the war, the 1950s obsession with flying saucers, martian invaders and radioactive annihilation put paid to any hopes for a sword and sorcery revival.

But then, in the early 60s, a small but talented group of writers founded an informal gathering called SAGA (The Swordsmen and Sorcerer's Guild of America). Including such genre giants as Lin Carter, Poul Anderson, L. Sprague De Camp, Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock, the group was largely responsible for redefining sword and sorcery fiction (Leiber in fact coined the term in 1961) and bringing it back to the public eye.

Each member was admitted to the group based solely on their sword and sorcery output. Moorcock was in for his 'Elric' tales for example and Fritz Leiber for his 'Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser' yarns. Several other authors were admitted in the late 60s and 70s, one of them being Diane Duane for 'The Door into Fire'.

Published in 1979, 'The Door into Fire' was the first novel of the New York-born author. It tells the tale of Herwiss, a man with the potential to become a great sorcerer, possessing the power of 'the flame'. Desperate to harness this power and focus it into the blade of a sword, Herwiss decides to seek a castle in the wastelands which contains many doors to other worlds.

Making the main character of a sword and sorcery novel bisexual and spending a good deal of time focusing on his homoerotic relationship with his best friend was a pretty bold choice for a genre that is famous for being about as heterosexual as possible. I mean, look at that cover. The classic dominant male pose instantly recognisable on a glut of sword and sorcery covers.

But the book itself is far from orthodox. Mixing Celtic mythology (the concept of the triple Goddess is used here expertly) with Germanic cultures, and the divided loyalties of the protagonist (would he rather continue in his quest for power or sacrifice it to aid his lover in reclaiming his crown?), the book reaches a much higher place than the more generic entries in the genre.

Chris Carlsen's 'Berserker' Trilogy

I love me a bit of sword and sorcery. These books, published in the late 70s, were really designed to cash in on the 'Conan' craze of book covers depicting mightily muscled warriors swinging improbably large axes against a backdrop of slaughter and nubile female forms. Although the Conan movie would not be released until 1982, Robert E. Howard's mighty Cimmerian was at the top of his game in the 70s with the popularity of the Frazetta-illustrated Lancer paperbacks and the Marvel comic book incarnation of the character.

As with any craze, there were a lot of crap imitations. And as always, there were a few gems too. The Berserker trilogy is one of them. Chris Carlsen was a pseudonym for Robert Holdstock whose reputation would later reach more lofty heights as the author of 'serious' fantasy like Mythago Wood and the excellent Merlin Codex. As with nearly all of Holdstock's work, the Berserker books depict a grim, gritty world full of bleak landscapes and earthy, dirty people. They are also brutally violent and contain more than a few scenes of rape.

Dealing with the theme of reincarnation, the books use an interesting timeframe. Rather than living one life after another as we might expect, the protagonist (Harald Swiftaxe, a Viking warrior cursed by Odin) finds each life taking place before the previous one. Put simply, the first book takes place during the Viking Age, the second several hundred years earlier in the world of Arthur and the Saxons, and the third even earlier during Roman Britain where a certain Boudicca is making a nuisance of herself.

I really love these books and intend to read them again soon. Holdstock... sorry, Carlsen, certainly knows his Norse and Celtic mythology and blends them well. The protagonist is an anti-hero to the full definition of the term. He is not a nice guy. But the world surrounding him isn't particularly nice either, which kind of makes his actions alright, I guess.

John Norman's Gor Books

Whilst poking around in a second hand bookshop the other day, I stumbled across a shrink-wrapped collection of the first four Gor books by John Norman. I've heard a lot about these books but have never read them until now. They have something of a saucy reputation and are often spoken of in connection with cults that involve BDSM. Naturally, I was intrigued...

I've read a couple of the John Carter of Mars stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Gor books really take their cue from there. Beginning in 1967, Chicago-born philosophy professor John Norman has written them steadily ever since and now the series numbers around 28 volumes. The books chronicle the adventures of history professor Tarl Cabot on the exotic 'counter-world' of Gor, a world ruled by the mysterious 'Priest-Kings' who regulate the advancement of technology and keep the human population in a state of barbarity. Gor is a world of rigid caste systems where Social Darwinism is brutally apparent and women exist merely as slaves and sex trophies. Not exactly the books to introduce to any staunch feminist girlfriends fellas!

Tarnsman of Gor's (1967) general plot is remarkably similar to Burroughs' Princess of Mars. During a ramble in the hills, Tarl Cabot is whisked away to an alien planet with no explanation given other than a cryptic letter from his father (who he never knew). Here, Cabot meets his long-absent father (who has been living on Gor for many years) and begins his training as a rider of the 'Tarns' - giant hawk-like birds. Cabot is given the mission of stealing the home stone of the rival city of Ar and falls in with Talena, the beautiful (and very bitchy) Princess of Ar.

Outlaw of Gor (1967) sees Tarl Cabot return to Gor after spending seven years back on Earth. Dismayed to find his home city of Ko-ro-ba razed to the ground and all of his former friends scattered across Gor, Cabot sets out for the Sadar Mountains where the Priest-Kings dwell but soon gets involved with Lara, the Tatrix of the city of Tharna and a conspiracy to usurp her throne.

Priest-Kings of Gor (1968) sees Tarl Cabot continue his quest into the Sadar Mountains. Here he enters the nest of the insectoid Priest-Kings who keep many humans as slaves. Treated with respect by his hosts, Tarl gets caught up in a civil war between two factions; that of Sarm and Misk - two rivals who want different things for the future of the nest.

Nomads of Gor (1969) follows Tarl Cabot in his search for the ferocious Wagon People who hold the last egg of the Priest-Kings and with it their last hope for survival. Infiltrating their violent culture, Cabot meets a prisoner called Elizabeth who is a fellow abductee from Earth.

The books are little more than pulpy fun but Norman does sometimes go off on a tangent in his descriptions of Gorean culture, and being a philosophy professor, he's pretty good at the old 'world building'. The books are also outrageously sexist (more so than normal in this genre) in that Norman's views on the role of women in society are less than appealing in this day and age. Tarl Cabot is an Earthman who encounters a world where a woman's role is completely subservient to that of a man. Rather than pronounce his disgust of such a society (as the reader might expect), Cabot in fact rather embraces it and likens the marriage traditions of his home planet to the rather more brutal ones of Gor (carrying a bride across the threshold = dragging a woman home against her will, wedding bands = slave manacles etc).

Everybody goes on about the BDSM connections when talking about these books, but honestly, I was surprised at the tameness of these four. I understand that Norman really played up the sex element in later books, but any kinky business in these ones is pretty low-key. But I suppose that the whole 'sex-cult' thing should be addressed. Now, knowing nothing about such things (ahem!) I had to do a little digging. Here's what Wikipedia has to say;

"As applied to non-fictional individuals, the word Gorean means an adherent of the philosophies espoused in Norman's writings, especially someone who lives a lifestyle based on this philosophy. While the most conspicuous Gorean departure from mainstream modern norms is that Goreans allow and indeed promote sexual master-slave relationships, many who take the Gorean worldview seriously would insist that being Gorean is not necessarily about either sex or slavery, but about the general Gorean philosophy (so that one would not have to participate in a master-slave lifestyle or relationship in order to be Gorean). Some of this philosophy is concerned with "natural order" and the relations between men and women, which may or may not take the form of a master-and-slave dynamic. Where there is a master-slave relationship, the level at which adherents follow the books varies."

These books were written at the height of the feminist movement, and John Norman apparently disagreed with such ideas, believing that women are naturally submissive (not inferior, mind). 'Goreans' just seem to adhere to this world view, regardless of sexual fun and games.

Also worth mentioning, are the two awful films based on Tarnsman and Outlaw of Gor. Produced by the infamous Cannon Productions (responsible for such classics as 1987's Masters of the Universe and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace) and starring Oliver Reed and Jack Palance, the films bear little relation to the books other than a few names and ideas. I haven't seen either, but if I ever get the chance, I shall certainly be reviewing them on this blog.

Gor (1987) and Outlaw of Gor (1989)