Nothing New Under the Sun

This week's installment of Pulp Fantasy Library discussed Robert E. Howard's story of Kull, "The Cat and the Skull." To the extent that the story is known at all, it's because it features the first appearance of the undead sorcerer. The revelation of his involvement in the events of the tale is quite memorable.

The face of the man was a bare white skull, in whose eye sockets flamed livid fire!

"Thulsa Doom!"

"Aye, I guessed as much!" exclaimed Ka-nu.

"Aye, Thulsa Doom, fools!" the voice echoed cavernously and hollowly. "The greatest of all wizards and your eternal foe, Kull of Atlantis! You have won this tilt but, beware, there shall be others."

Years ago, when I first read this story, I was convinced that it had to have been the origin of D&D's lich. While I knew the lich from the AD&D Monster Manual, with its unforgettable illustration by Dave Trampier, the lich was introduced into the game through Supplement I to OD&D, Greyhawk. There, liches are described as "skeletal monsters of magical original, each Lich being a very powerful Magic-User or Magic-User/Cleric in life, and now alive only by means of great spells and will." The longer description in the Monster Manual adds that a lich possesses not just a skeletal form but "eyesockets mere black holes with glowing points of light." That sound a lot like REH's description of Thulsa Doom to me.

The early 1970s was a remarkable time for aficionados of Robert E. Howard's writing. Not only was Lancer releasing its paperback editions of Howard's sword-and-sorcery yarns, but Marvel Comics was producing comic adaptations of many of them as well. In addition to the much more well known and celebrated Conan the Barbarian (and, later, Savage Sword of Conan), Marvel adapted Howard's characters and stories in other

magazines, such as Monsters on the Prowl. Issue #16 of that magazine (April 1972) featured an original Kull story called "The Forbidden Swamp," in which Thulsa Doom is introduced to comics readers. As drawn by the brother and sister team of John and Marie Severin, Thulsa Doom shares a lot with D&D's lich, don't you think?

For years afterward, I held on to my theory that it was Thulsa Doom who had inspired Gary Gygax in his creation of the lich. Not only was there much similarity between their descriptions, but Thulsa Doom's earliest published appearance, whether in Lancer's King Kull anthology or Marvel's comics, occurred just before the publication of OD&D. There was thus a certain plausibility to the one having been inspired by the other.

As it turned out, my theory was wrong – or at least not the whole story. Many years later, in one of his many online question and answer threads, I recall that Gygax admitted he swiped the lich from "The Sword of the Sorcerer," a Kothar story by Gardner F. Fox. In that tale, Kothar encounters an undead sorcerer named Afgorkon, who is repeatedly referred to by the word "lich," something that cannot be said of Thulsa Doom so far as I can tell. That's not to say that Thulsa Doom might not have exercised some influence over the creation of D&D's lich, only that he wasn't, at least as far as Gygax claimed, the primary one. It's not as if the idea of a skeletal, undead sorcerer is a wholly unique idea anyway.

That's something I keep in mind whenever I look almost any element of Dungeons & Dragons. Very little of it is genuinely unique to the game. I'd wager that almost all of its monsters, spells, and magic items derive from a pre-existing story, comic, movie, or TV show. Indeed, it probably wouldn't take much work to demonstrate this, since Gygax and others were often quite open about the earlier creators and works that inspired them. I don't mean this to be a criticism – far from it! Rather, I bring this up simply as a reminder that what makes D&D special is not any of its individual elements, very few of which are original, but rather the strange alchemy of their admixture. 

Pulp Fantasy Library: Warrior of Llarn

For various reasons, I've been on something of a sword-and-planet kick. As a sub-genre of fantasy, it's one of my favorites, due in no small part to my encountering the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs at an impressionable age. Invariably such stories feature ancient, dying worlds dotted with decadent civilizations, bizarre monsters, and science so advanced that it is indistinguishable from sorcery. That's a heady mix of ingredients for exciting tales of adventure – little wonder, then, that the text of the three little brown books of Dungeons & Dragons frequently refers to Barsoom and the exploits of John Carter there.

Warrior of Llarn is Gardner F. Fox's entry into the field of sword-and-planet fiction, first published in 1964. This initial release boasts a terrific cover by none other than Frank Frazetta. This is several years prior to his moody paintings gracing the covers of the Lancer Conan paperbacks that would soon be found on spinner racks everywhere. Heresy though this probably is, I actually like this cover better than some of his Conan efforts. I think it's the red-tinted nighttime sky that does it for me, I'm not sure.

Warrior of Llarn begins portentously, as the protagonist, who later identifies himself as Alan Morgan, is awakened by "an alien voice," saying, "Come to me, man of Earth! I call! I call!" Morgan tells the reader that 

This was not the first time I had heard it, not even the hundredth. It had come to me ever since I can remember, first as a small child, then as a youth and now – as a man. It was an old friend.

Morgan ponders the mystery of this voice.

What did this voice want of me? What mission was I to go on for this being whose mind was so incredibly powerful it could bypass the barriers of the space-time continuum to find and summon me? I lay there and tried to think, to go over what part the voice played in my life, its meaning and its inexorable hold on my body and my mind.

All my life I have heard the voice.

Morgan then describes to the reader – through first-person narration, like John Carter before him – that he was the "youngest son of a prosperous Middle West lawyer" and that he had gone to the "right schools," played the "right sports," and had even spent time in a military school, where he learned to shoot and duel. He enjoyed fishing and hunting and had learned survive in the wilds on his own. Morgan suspects that the voice had been guiding him in his choices, as if preparing him for something. Furthermore, it contributed to his natural restlessness, his sense that he "belonged to another place and another time." 

While out hunting "in the Goose Island country," where his family owns a cabin, Morgan encounters a wolf that had been terrorizing the region. Though he had intended to put it down, the beast gets the drop on him and leaps at him, biting his arm. Morgan falls backward and suddenly finds himself "lay[ing] on my back under a huge, hot sun." Beneath him was sand and there was no sign of his rifle – or his clothes – though he bore a wound on his arm from where the wolf had bitten him. 

Rather than being shocked or frightened by his circumstances, Morgan quickly assumes he must be on some other world. He waits for the voice he'd since childhood to address him, but it does not. Not wasting time, he gets up and assesses his circumstances. He notices that "my body seemed to be stronger, my step lighter," which leads him to conclude that the world on which he found himself must be smaller than Earth and with a lower gravity. If this all sounds familiar, it should.

Morgan walks until his feet are sore. He notices "a mighty band of glistening matter" in the sky and concludes that this planet had rings about it, though it is clearly not Saturn. After more walking, he encounters a group of blue men "mounted on some sort of four-legged beat like a horse." The blue men have horns on their heads and a "beast-like appearance." Nearby is a "long dark altar of bright black stone" upon which rests a metal ball, no bigger than a marble that somehow he knew "was infinitely important." Through his actions, one of the blue men is slain and the others flee. With the metal ball in hand, he takes the blue man's clothing and weapons and then mounts the weird horse-like animal to explore this alien planet to which he has been brought for reasons still unknown.

Would you believe that Morgan eventually finds and rescues a local princess, Tuarra, from a larger group of blue men – Azunn, we later learn they are called – after her flier crashes in the desert? Her skin is golden rather than red and, though she is certainly lovely, she's never once described as "incomparable," but astute readers know the score. Warrior of Llarn continues like this throughout. It's a (no pun intended) naked pastiche of E.R. Burroughs's Barsoom novels, though, to his credit, Fox does throw a few wrinkles into the formula. Despite this, I liked it well enough. Its brevity (about 150 pages) is a huge point in its favor and Fox's prose is similarly brisk. Whether that's enough for anyone else I leave to readers to decide for themselves.

Thongor!

In my post yesterday about Lin Carter and his involvement with the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon, I mentioned that eight Marvel comics featured Carter's Conan knock-off Thongor of Lemuria. The first of these appeared in March 1973 and, along with another published in May of the same year, partially adapted the story "Thieves of Zangabal." Purely from a historical perspective, these issues are worthy of mention because George Alec Effinger wrote the scripts for them. 

Starting in July 1973, Marvel produced six more issues of Creatures on the Loose featuring Thongor. These issues adapt stories from the 1965 collection, The Wizard of Lemuria and feature script work by Gardner Fox and Steve Gerber. 

Even more intriguing than these eight comics is the unrealized Thongor movie(s) that could have happened during the 1970s. This page contains a great of information on the subject about which I knew nothing until now. Chief among the remarkable details revealed there is that none other than David Prowse, Darth Vader himself, would have played Thongor – a fascinating alternate universe indeed!

Pulp Fantasy Library: Out of the Eons

Thanks to reader Daniel Eness, I was finally able to obtain a copy of the first -- and, so far as I know, only -- issue of a Dragon magazine spin-off called Dragontales. Appearing in August 1980, this Kim Mohan-edited periodical described itself as "an anthology of all-new fantasy fiction." There's no introductory editorial or explanatory text anywhere. Instead, what we get are ten short stories by a variety of authors, some of whose names will be familiar but most of which won't be: John L. Jenkins, Ruby S.W. Jung, Carl Parlagreco, Roger Moore, David F. Nalle, Janrae Frank, Martin Mundt, Marie Desjardins, and of course Gardner F. Fox, whose contribution is another story of Niall of the Far Travels -- the only one I was missing, which is why I'm very thankful to Daniel for having sent this magazine to me.

Entitled "Out of the Eons" (not to be confused with the Lovecraft tale with a similar title), this short story continues in sequence with all of its predecessors, making Fox's final published Niall story a strange outlier. Of potential interest to historians of the hobby is that the illustrations accompanying this tale are by Kevin Siembieda, who'd already been doing artwork for Judges Guild by this point in time and would soon go on to found Palladium Books. "Out of the Eons" begins with the Far Traveler unwittingly freeing a being called Adonair, who is described by a goddess in human guise as

"A god-being from far away -- so far that even we gods and goddesses have only heard faint whispers of his birthing place. He came here eons ago, liked what he saw about him and made this world his own."

She shuddered. "But he was evil. Evil! He made men his slaves, his -- playthings. Against him the people cried out. We heard their calls, their prayers, in those other -- spaces -- where we dwell. We heard, we came. We fought Adonair and reduced him to a green flame, but we could not kill him. And so, as a green flame he has dwelt here for uncounted centuries."

Reading this passage I'm reminded that one of the things I like most about the Niall stories is the way Fox describes the gods of the setting. The phrase "god-beings" is used often, which suggests to me that they are "gods" in the way similar to Lovecraft's Great Old Ones -- they're immensely powerful and otherworldly but not necessarily "divine" in the usual sense. Adonair definitely has a Lovecraftian vibe to him, I found myself thinking of Gygax's Tharizdun, even though I'm certain that dread deity had been created well before this story was published.

In any event, "Out of the Eons" places the gods at front and center. Through the intercession of one deity, Niall is taken in his dream to a council of the gods, where the All-Father, their seeming leader, elects to send a goddess named Thallatta to Niall in human form so as to aid him in returning Adonair to his prison. Niall must do this not because of any special destiny but because he was responsible for freeing Adonair in the first place. Thalatta, on the other hand, seems to have taken a powerful liking to Niall, for reasons that become more apparent as the story progresses.

"Out of the Eons" is, like most of the entries in Niall's saga, a fun read. I must admit to liking this one more than some, because of the additional details it gives about the gods and their relationship to the world of mortals. That surprises me a bit, since, in general, I prefer deities to remain aloof and even unknowable in fantasy settings (that's certainly the tack I took in Dwimmermount) rather than as undeniably involved and/or meddling in human affairs. Yet, that's just what we get in "Out of the Eons" and I loved it. Go figure.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Coming of the Sword

Issue #55 (November 1981) was the last issue in which a story about Gardner Fox's Niall of the Far Travels appeared. There are a number of things that are interesting about this final appearance of the Northumbrian barbarian. First, Kim Mohan, in his editorial, calls the stories of Niall "one of DRAGON's specialties." Then, he apologizes for the fact that it had been nearly a year since a new story had appeared, adding that it was Dragon's fault, not Fox's. Second, the story that appears in this issue, "The Coming of the Sword," is out of sequence from its predecessors. Instead of picking up after the last one, this new -- and, as it turns out, final -- one presents us with the tale of Niall's very first adventure, when he was a young man. Now, presenting the adventures of a sword-and-sorcery hero out of chronological order has a long pedigree, going back to Conan the Cimmerian at least, but I find it odd in this case, because it's different from what Fox had done in all his previous stories.

Of course, we'll never know if this represented a change in direction for the Niall of the Far Travels series, since it was the last one ever published. After "The Coming of the Sword," no more appeared, either in the pages of Dragon or elsewhere. I'd love to know why that was the case, but I suspect it's a mystery without any easy answer (unless, of course, Kim Mohan could be prevailed upon to remember what happened -- assuming he even knows). Even without that knowledge, "The Coming of the Sword" is a strange story. I say "strange" in that it not only shows us a younger, less experienced Niall but it shows him in his homeland, which comes across as a Norse pastiche, right down to invocations of Freya, Thor, and Wodin. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, but previous installments in the series were filled wholly imaginary deities with no connection to our world.

The story tells of Niall's discovery of a beautiful woman frozen in the ice. While he stares in awe at her, he hears a voice in his head say: "Free me! free me, man of the outer world! free me — and know my
gratitude!" Naturally, he decides to follow her wishes and spends hours attempting to chip away at the ice that contains her. He eventually succeeds and the woman awakens, claiming to be Clovia, the queen of Helios, a realm of which Niall has never heard. This causes Clovia to realize that she must have been imprisoned within the ice for untold years and that her captor, "a magician ... out of the East," must likely be dead by now. Still, she hopes that he homeland of Helios still exists and asks Niall to act as her bodyguard as she makes the long journey there. She promises him riches and fame in her service, both of which get Niall's attention. He had already decided to see more of the "warmer world" anyway, so he agrees to accompany Clovia.

The remainder of this lengthy story concerns the travels of Niall and Clovia as they seek out Helios. Along the way, they encounter numerous dangers, which not only help to establish the barbarian's skill at arms but also serves to highlight just how much the world has changed since Clovia's time. As the duo get closer to her homeland, it becomes ever less likely that Helios has still survived the centuries. Yet, Clovia still holds out hope and Niall does not abandon her, instead forging ahead into the unknown, in the process showing him a wider world beyond the northlands from which he came. We begin to see him become the character we saw in earlier entries in the series.

With that, the Niall of the Far Travels series comes to a close. There's one story left that I have not read, but I'll rectify that soon. When I do, I'll make a post about it. All in all, I enjoyed the series. Not every entry was pure gold, but many were fun to read, filled with well-imagined scenes and engaging characters. It's a pity the series ended so abruptly. It's even more of a pity that these stories have never been collected together under a single cover. I think they'd make a great read for fantasy gamers looking for inspiration.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Lure of the Golden Godling

Though the Niall of the Far Travels series consists of ten short stories, I own only nine of them. The eighth installment, which comes between "The Cup of the Golden Death" and today's entry, is entitled "Out of the Eons" and appeared in the premier issue (August 1980) of a TSR periodical not many people remember, Dragontales. Dragontales was an anthology of short fiction that, so far as I know, did not last more than a couple of issues. I remember seeing copies of it in bookstores and hobby shops in the early '80s, but I never picked one up for myself. Consequently, I won't be discussing "Out of the Eons" here, though I will be making an effort to try and find a copy at some point in the future.

The ninth Niall story, "The Lure of the Golden Godling," appeared in issue #44 of Dragon (December 1980), begins with the barbarian walking the night streets of the city of Urgrik, where he comes upon what appears to be a man -- or a body -- lying motionless on a cobblestone street. Examining the shape closer, Niall soon realizes that it is neither a living nor a dead man at all, but rather a golden statue bundled up in some cloth:

It was no more than a foot high, and had obviously been carved by a master craftsman. It showed something amorphous, almost shapeless, yet possessed of some strange, other-worldly power. Its rounded eyes seemed to peer upwards at Niall, as though promising him untold wealth and power even as a tiny voice whispered soothingly inside his brain.

Niall growled under his breath. He did not like these mysterious manifestations of the many gods that infested his world.

Despite his distaste for anything having to do with the gods, Niall decides to hold on to the idol, which he reckons to be solid gold. He takes it back with him to his palace in the city and, before he reaches it, he is set upon by a beautiful young woman. The woman, who identifies herself as Thayya, begs Niall to give her the statue: "Come with me and you shall be rewarded," she says. The northern warrior senses a trap -- indeed, he hopes it is a trap, as he's in the mood for adventure -- but nevertheless agrees to come with Thayya.

Niall's instincts are correct. Though the young woman tries to ply him with gold and other enticements in exchange for the statue, when he falls prey to neither, she calls on assassins to try and slay him.

Niall bellowed with delight. His great sword came up into his hand and he swung it like a scythe. A head toppled from a neck, and then Blood-drinker was burying its keen blade into a shoulder, half severing it.

The Far Traveler moved like a cat. He was half across the room even as he was freeing his blade from bleeding flesh, lifting it to swing again, and then again. At each stroke of that shining steel, blood spurted. Heads were cloven, arms were sheared. Only now and again did he use his blade as a shield to deflect the blows that were aimed at him.

Niall was in his glory, with the ring of steel in his ears and the sight of armed men coming at him. For this he had been born, to fight—and to fight even harder against such odds.

He heard Thayya urging on the men amid whispered prayers to whatever gods she worshipped. She was backing slowly toward the door, eyes big with terror, as she saw how Niall fought.

Niall wanted to reach her, to take her with him to answer questions. But the mercenaries who fought him seemed to detect what it was he wanted. They flung themselves before him; they gave up their lives to protect the woman.

Thayya moved toward the doorway and slipped through it, closing and bolting the door behind her. Niall growled low in his throat, hurled himself even more savagely at the men who still faced him.

They went down before his blade until he was the only thing standing in the room. As the last man fell, Niall shook himself and lowered his sword. He moved toward the thick door that blocked the path deeper into the building. It was barred, bolted.

Niall shrugged. The woman was long gone.

Needless to say, Niall decides to find out more about both the golden statue and Thayya, a quest that takes him not just far away from Urgrik but involves him in the machinations of the very gods themselves. Ultimately, that's what makes "The Lure of the Golden Godling" such a compelling read. Gardner Fox does a lot to flesh out the gods of Niall's world -- their relationships, their petty feuds and jealousies, their need for human worshipers -- and this goes a long way, I think, it distinguishing this series from others of its kind. There's good reason Niall wishes to avoid having anything to do with the gods and "The Lure of the Golden Godling" makes the reader see the wisdom in his stance. It's a fun story and a very gameable one, too, something that a great many tales of gods and men are not -- another point in its favor.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Cup of Golden Death

The seventh installment of Gardner Fox's series about Niall of the Far Travels appeared in issue #38 of Dragon (June 1980), in a short story called "The Cup of Golden Death." As with so many of its predecessors, this one begins in medias res, just as Niall, still in the employ of King Lurlyr Manakor of Urgrik, and traveling with Maralia, high priestess of the god Humalorr, uncovers a cup buried in the ground.

His huge hand went out to the sand, brushed more avidly at it. The tiny grains flew away, disclosing a rounded bit of metal. The breath came short and fast now to his lungs; excitement was awash inside him.
“
"Maralia!"” he bellowed.

A girl came running across the flat moorland, her red hair glinting in the sunlight. She wore a thin, short skirt and a vest, and little more. The vest was held together by silver chains, and it was decorated with silver thread that bespoke her rank as high priestess of the god-being, Humalorr.

She fell to her knees beside him, her eyes hungry at the sight of that which he had partially uncovered. Her tongue came out to moisten her ripe, red lips.

"“Have you found it? Is it the—cup of the god?”"

Niall grunted. "“Who knows? I’'d stake my life on the fact that it’s a ceremonial cup of some kind, but whether it belongs to your god or not, you yourself have to decide.”"

Niall seeks the cup, because of its rumored ability to heal any ailment. His master, Lurlyr Manakor, "lay in a deathlike trance" of unknown origin and would surely die without its aid, or so claimed the king's physician, who'd tried every other remedy at his disposal but to no avail. Of course, like all pulp fantasy barbarians, Niall distrusts magic of any kind and believes the cup to be a bane rather a boon. Nevertheless, he does as he is commanded, keeping his eyes open for evidence of treachery.

And a good thing, too! Maralia has other plans for the cup, owing to the plans of her master, the high priest of Humalorr.

Yet she was sworn to do what had been whispered into her ears by the high priest short days ago, when they had been last in Urgrik. Niall was to go with her to the moors of Lurydia. There they were to find the ancient cup which once had been used by the wizard. Yellixin, in the ancient days when there had been a citadel standing where they now knelt.

After that— --

Maralia swallowed. She was to kill Niall and bring the cup back to the high priest, to Aldon Hurazin himself. And Aldon Hurazin would hide the cup so that it might not be used to save the life of Lurlyr Manakor.

From this conflict between Niall and Maralia -- or, rather, her superior, the high priest Aldon Hurazin -- regarding the cup does the whole of this story flow. It's a very good story, in my opinion, both for the relative complexity of its plot and for the picture it paints of the nature of magic and the gods in Niall's world. Naturally, one should not expect philosophical depth or profundity from a pulp fantasy such as this one, but Fox nevertheless manages to elevate this tale above mere swordplay and spell slinging. I think "The Cup of Golden Death" is one of the best stories in the series for sheer entertainment value, as well as the way it continues to raise the stakes in the unfolding saga of Niall's adventures.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Cube from Beyond

Issue #36 (April 1980) saw the sixth literary appearance of Gardner Fox's barbarian sellsword, Niall of the Far Travels, in a short story delightfully titled "The Cube from Beyond." I'm honestly not sure why, but magical/mystical cubes are commonplace in pulp fantasy and science fiction, from De Camp and Pratt's carnelian cube to the "queer, smooth cube" of "The Challenge from Beyond" to the Cosmic Cube of Marvel comics fame. So this installment's title -- and content -- places it firmly within a well-established tradition.

As the short story begins, Niall is still the commander of the armies of Urgrik and is pursuing the magician-king Thavas Tomer, whose stronghold he and his army have breached. Thavas wishes to elude capture and uses every trick at his disposal to throw off the relentless barbarian. When at last his tricks seem to have been exhausted, he flees up some stairs, with Niall close on his heels.

He came at last into a small room, the windows of which looked out over the city and the plains stretching in all directions beyond it. Thavas Tomer was standing beside a large blue cube dotted with a myriad of bright little specks that looked like imprisoned stars.

The magician-king was tall, almost as tall as Niall. He was broad of shoulder and lean of waist; he looked more like a warrior than a magician. There was a cunning smile on this thin lips.

“No more, Niall,” he rasped. “I flee no further.”

“Then surrender.”

Thavas Tomer laughed: harsh, mocking laughter it was, as he drew himself to his full height. “You can never make me surrender, general. Na, na. I have a way to get away from you, even here and now, with you so close.”

His laughter rang out as Niall started forward. With the ease of a trained athlete, Thavas Tomer leaped upward to the top of that big cube— and began to sink into it.

Recognizing the cube as an object of sorcery, Niall decides to take it with him, as a spoil of war. He returns to Urgrik, parading it through the streets, before he presents it to his liege, King Lurlyr Manakor, who congratulates him on having "done what no other man could do." The king wants nothing to do with the cube and gives it to Niall, who takes it back to his own palatial home, where it sits for several months, with no sign as to its true nature.

Despite this seeming inactivity, Niall remains fascinated by the cube. He seeks out his friend, the sage Danko Penavar, to see if he had ever heard of the cube and its strange powers.

Almost under his breath, the old man whispered, “I have heard of it. In very ancient tomes have I come upon faint hints of it, fearful references to that cube.”

He shook his head until the white hairs of his head and beard swayed lazily. “Never did I think to lay eyes upon that thing. I believed it lost forever.”
“Well, what is it?’

“It was created long and long ago by a great magician. It is a universe unto itself, that cube. It is protected by secret sigils and enchantments that have long since been forgotten.”

“Not by Thavas Tomer, it seems.”

The old man smiled wryly. “I wonder where he found it? Where he discovered the way in which to make it work for him?’

“Can I go into it, as Thavas Tomer did?”

Danko Penavar scowled. “You would be advised not to. I know nothing of what might await you inside that thing-always assuming there is a way into it. For you, I mean. It would be best for you to forget the cube—and Thavas Tomer.”

Needless to say, Niall doesn't heed Penavar's words and instead intends to enter the cube and find Thavas Tomer -- and whatever else is inside it.

"The Cube from Beyond" is another fun tale that takes some hackneyed pulp fantasy ideas and presents them engagingly. As I've said many times now, this seems to have been Gardner Fox's great gift, one that ought to be of particular interest to referees of RPGs. All too often I hear jaded gamers cry out for "originality," a quality that, if it even exists, is vastly overrated in my opinion. Far more interesting, I think, is to see well-used concepts, situations, and characters presented with cleverness and flair, something that Fox does exceedingly well. "The Cube from Beyond" is a terrific sword-and-sorcery romp that proves once again that just because a story has been told before doesn't mean it can't be retold in an enjoyable way.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Eyes of Mavis Deval

The fifth (of ten) short stories featuring Gardner Fox's Niall of the Far Travels appeared in issue #33 (January 1980) of Dragon, in a short story entitled "The Eyes of Mavis Deval." Interestingly, this is the first short story in the series that didn't receive the cover image. I'm not sure much can be made of this, since some of the subsequent short stories do get cover images (though not all of them), but it's worth noting nonetheless.

This installment in Niall's saga begins, as so many of its predecessor did, with a girl, the Mavis Deval of the title, whom Niall first spots on a dais in a slave market and to whom he is inexplicably drawn.

It was her eyes that drew his stare as he sat astride the high-peak saddle of his stallion, there on the edge of the huge slave market. They were a brilliant green, those eyes, and it seemed to Niall of the Far Travels as he looked, that there was a tiny flame glowing in each pupil.

Niall stood in the stirrups, lifting his giant body upright. Clad in the silver chainmail of his rank as High Commander of the armies of Urgrik, with the scarlet cloak hanging from his wide shoulders, he was ignorant of the men and women who turned to regard him.

All he was aware of was the girl.

This story continues the tradition of Fox's previous ones in that, while not necessarily a direct sequel to the previous story in the series, it nevertheless follows it in clear chronological order, unlike, say, Howard's Conan tales, which bounce back and forth across the whole of the Cimmerian's life. Speaking of Conan, Fox's description of Niall's actions toward the slave girl and of the barbarian's lifestyle sets him apart from his inspiration.

Niall paced the black stallion slowly over the cobblestones of the city, wondering at the eldritch impulse that had made him buy this girl. He owned no slaves, he did not believe in slavery, though it was practiced everywhere in his world. Well, that was easy enough to handle. He would free the girl, give her some gold, and send her on her way.

And yet—

There was something about her that appealed to him. He had never paid much attention to women, except for a tavern girl now and then, to assuage the hungers of his flesh. Perhaps it had been the sort of life he had, wandering here and there across his world, that had made him lead this almost monastic life.

To read of any pulp fantasy character as having led an "almost monastic life" is unusual, all the moreso when the character in question is a mighty-threwed barabrian. It's little things like that endear these stories to me, despite their lightness. Gardner Fox may not be the most original of writers, but he nevertheless imbues his pastiche work with imagination, playing with one's expectations and reworking familiar characters and plots into things that somehow transcend their origins.

Hating slavery and having "no room in [his] life for a girl," Niall intends to free Mavis Deval, after he has given her some decent clothes and some money to make her way in the world. Oddly, Mavis has no desire to leave Niall's side, which arouses the barbarian's suspicion. She attempts to use her considerable charms to win his affection but to little avail; he still wishes to free her and have her out of his life. Realizing this, the girl then reveals that she knows the location of "a very big treasure," whose location she learned from men speaking on the caravan on which she traveled with the other slaves.  

This piques Niall's interest, but, even so, he is wary and decides to consult with a wizard of his acquaintance, Danko Penavar. When he tells the old man about the treasure Mavis mentioned, Penavar warns him against seeking it.

“It is not good, that treasure, Niall. Be advised. Forget about it.”

Niall grinned. “But there is a treasure?”

“Oh, yes. But it is cursed. Sisstorississ himself lays claim to it, and Sisstorississ is a jealous god.”

Niall had run afoul of the snake god Sisstorississ in an early story, which inflames his curiosity about the treasure rather than dissuading him from seeking it. After consulting with the wizard, he then sets out, with Mavis Deval, to the hills of Kareen, where she claims the treasure lies. Niall fully expects a nasty surprise to await him, but he is at least prepared for it -- or so he thinks.

As I said earlier, "The Eyes of Mavis Deval" isn't a particularly original story, at least in terms of its basic ideas. Yet, Gardner Fox does a superb job of taking a well-worn plot and stock characters and imbuing them with lively interest. Like the previous entries in this series, this is a fun story engagingly told, displaying more than enough cleverness to hold my attention. I liked it a lot.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Thing from the Tomb

The next installment in Gardner Fox's saga of Niall of the Far Travels is "The Thing from the Tomb," which appeared in issue #23 (March 1979) of Dragon. What's interesting about this series is that, unlike Robert E. Howard's Conan tales, they're told in chronological order. Fox implies that Niall has other adventures between the published short stories, but each of them clearly takes place after the one that preceded it. Consequently, when we meet Niall at the beginning of "The Thing from the Tomb," he's still in the employ of King Lurlyr Manakor of Urgrik, as he was in "The Stolen Sacrifice." This time, though, he's the supreme commander of the king's armies and is leading a large number of his troops into the Balakanian Desert, where he's on an inspection tour of the forts that dot this desolate area.

While traveling, Niall encounters a wounded veteran, whom he quickly moves to aid. When asked what happened to him, he replies:
The man opened his eyes.

“Death,” he whispered. “Death came in the night and —” He choked and his eyes closed. Niall leaned closer, his arm about the man, half lifting him as if to ease him of his pain.

The soldier smiled, nodded. His eyes opened once again. “Beware the fort. They’re all dead, inside it. Only I got away. Crawled. Crawled until I—could crawl no more.”

His hand closed on Niall’s wrist. “Beware the thing in the fort. It cannot — be killed . . .”

The man shuddered and writhed as pain ate inside him. He gasped at the hot desert air and stared upward into the face of the man who bent above him.

“It began when they were di-digging . . . digging to find more water. They — uncovered an old-tomb. And then . . ."

The man shuddered once more, violently, and then his body sagged. Niall looked down at him with pity in his eyes. Pity and — admiration. If this man had not struggled and fought to crawl out this far away from the frontier fort, he and his men would have ridden into untold danger.

It's a fairly clichéd beginning to what is my least favorite of these stories so far, but one that nevertheless continues to develop Niall's character in ways that clearly distinguish him from Conan and his many literary doppelgangers. That, for me, is what makes "The Thing from the Tomb" worth reading, despite the weakness of its story.

After meeting the veteran, Niall decides to head off — alone — to investigate the fort from which the dying man came. When his lieutenant questions the wisdom of this, the barbarian explains, "I am one man. I may discover what the thing is that has killed. One man may hide where many cannot. Besides, now that I command the armies of the king, mine is the duty to protect them." This explanation makes no sense whatsoever in my opinion. But it sounds noble, establishing that Niall takes his responsibilities as commander seriously. More importantly, it separates him from a huge number of professional soldiers, thus making it possible to place him in credible danger.

In time, Niall learms that the Balakanian Desert was once the realm of Sosaria Thota.

 “A most famous witch. Some said she was the daughter of a demon, She ruled this part of the world with cruel fingers. Kings and emperors paid her fortunes to have her cast spells for them.”

I do not think I'm surprising anyone by revealing that Sosaria Thota is not in fact dead and that she is "the thing" mentioned in the short story's title, whose awakening led to the destruction of the desert fort. When Sosaria meets Niall, she is impressed by his honesty when he says that he would slay her to protect Urgrik. She then asks him of the current state of the world and commands him to show it to her. Niall reluctantly agrees, hoping that he might find a way to destroy her, as he originally intended. How he goes about this is the true meat of the story.

As I said, "The Thing from the Tomb" is fairly weak as a story. Too much of its narrative happens simply because it must or else Gardner Fox can't advance his plot. At the same time, I find myself sufficiently interested in Niall and his world that I am willing to put aside such concerns and allow myself to be carried forward. Whether a reader is able to do that will probably determine whether or not they, too, will enjoy "The Thing from the Tomb."

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Stolen Sacrifice

The third of Gardner Fox's short stories about Niall of the Far Travels, which appeared in issue #13 (April 1978) of Dragon, is, in my opinion, much more interesting than the two that preceded it. Part of that is simply that, with two stories under his belt, Fox can now refer back to his earlier efforts, which lends some depth and texture to both Niall and the world he inhabits. So, when readers who've been following the series since the beginning see the names "Urgrik" or "Emelkartha," they're invested with some meaning. A bigger part, I think, is simply that Fox has, by this point, developed a better sense of who Niall is and what his world are like in his own mind and that makes for a stronger story. I know well that, when I start developing an idea -- any idea -- there's usually a point when things start to gel for me and that makes my work before that point look crude and inchoate (because they are). It's frankly a testament to Fox's creativity that his Niall stories started to become more than just generic sword-and-sorcery tales as early as his third entry.

"The Stolen Sacrifice" begins with Niall in the great city of Urgrik, about which we've heard mention since "Shadow of a Demon." When the story opens, Niall has seemingly been in the city for some time, in the employ of its king, Lurlyr Manakor. Of his prior service, we learn a little over the course of this story but much remains left to the imagination of the reader -- a tried-and-true device of many pulp fantasies and one of which I'm particularly fond. I'm firmly of the opinion that we don't need stories covering every second of a fictional protagonist's life, especially not his "origin." I much prefer that there be blank spots in his history; somehow, this seems more believable and compelling to me.

The man moved silently through the shadows, keeping always to the darkest places. He moved as an animal might, his body poised for instant action, a big hand on the hilt of the longsword by his side. His eyes darted from a doorway to the far corner, where the wind blew a length of scarlet silk hanging from the wall. Caution was in his great body, for he knew that should he be seen this night, death would be his reward.

Niall of the Far Travels was not afraid, though he knew that he would be killed, and in no pleasant way, should anyone discover him, or guess where he went — and why.

For fair Amyrilla of the golden hair had been condemned to die by order of Thyra, queen in Urgrik where Lurlyr Manakor was king. Amyrilla was the favorite concubine of Lurlyr Manakor, and Thyra was jealous of her barbaric beauty. And so Thyra had prevailed upon Lurlyr Manakor to offer her up to the grim god Korvassor in his splendid temple in Urgrik.

Amyrilla was not yet dead. Her death would come in hours, when the priests of Korvassor gathered in the temple to summon up their god. There would be no eyes to see that death, other than those of the priests of Korvassor. Amyrilla would be dragged screaming into the maw of the grim god, to be devoured, and only Lurlyr Manakor would grieve for her.

Well, that was not quite true. Niall would grieve as well, for in the weeks that he had been here in Urgrik, serving under Lurlyr Manakor, Niall had come to know pretty Amyrilla, and had loved her for her gentle ways. Yet now she was to die, abandoned by all save Niall himself.

That's a very solid beginning, providing the reader with everything he needs to know to enjoy what follows. As that opening (and the story's title) suggest, Niall intends to rescue Amyrilla from the priests of the god Korvassor -- and he does. But the real story begins after the barbarian sellsword has achieved his initial aim. After all, it's one thing to rescue a concubine from immediate harm; it's another thing entirely to spirit her away to complete safety. "The Stolen Sacrifice" deals with that very question, along the way taking unexpected turns that see not only the return of a major figure from a previous story but also the suggestion of a greater destiny for Niall that's quite different than the one he'd have chosen for himself.

"The Stolen Sacrifice" is a very fun read, certainly my favorite of the series so far and a pulp fantasy that's simultaneously in the same vein as Howard's Conan yarns and one that is bold enough to go in its own direction. It's well worth reading, if you can find a copy.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Beyond the Wizard Fog

Issue #5 (March 1977) of Dragon (or The Dragon, as it was still called back then) saw the second appearance of Gardner F. Fox's barbarian protagonist, Niall of the Far Travels. The story begins as Niall is aboard a boat traveling along the great river Thalamar toward the great city of Urgrik, where he hopes to find lucrative employment. His journey is interrupted by the appearance of a "great white fog" on the river, a fog that Niall believes smacks of sorcery, a claim of which the ship's captain is not so sure. The two of them examine navigation charts of the river and on them the barbarian warriors spots something that, in his mind, confirm his suspicions:

“There,” Niall said, jabbing his finger.

“Those ruins . . .” “ . . . are only ruins,” scoffed the captain.

“Na, na. They’re more than a pile of rocks. There’s evil there, Edron Hobbort. Ancient evil.”

“Now, how can you know that?”

Niall straightened slowly. He tried to think, yet could not. Almost dazedly, he passed a hand across his broad brow. “I — cannot say. And yet — I know. It’s as if — something whispered into my mind. But it told me of an evil that has come recently to life, back across eons of Time — and made its home close by this river.”

Edron Hobbort snorted. “Nonsense. That ruin has been uninhabited since Porthia Malvia was queen in Angalore, and that’s about ten centuries ago. We’ll go on. If the sails won’t work, the oars will.”

Niall is, of course, right to be worried, especially after the ship enters the fog and strange things begin to happen. First, the fog stings his flesh, as if tiny insects had flown across the deck. Then, the ship moved, seemingly of its own accord, toward an ancient wharf, and the ship's crew, including its captain disembarked, hypnotized by some force that did not affect Niall. Not long after they enter the fog, the swordsman hears a cry. Against his better judgment, he rushes headlong into the fog beyond the wharf, thinking at first he might find a hint of what became of the crew. Instead, he comes across a young woman being lowered into a pit, at the bottom of which is a giant snake.

Naturally, Niall rescues the woman, whose name he learns is Kathyla. She expresses surprise that the barbarian was unaffected by the same magic that bewitched the crew of the ship on which he traveled. She explains that this island, Kor Magnon, is now the home of an evil wizard called Ulkarion.

“Ulkarion needs sacrifices for Sisstorississ, the snake-like god who dwells in labyrinthine hells far out in space. Long ago, Sisstorississ was worshipped here in Kor Magnon.” She caught the bewilderment in his eyes and smiled faintly.

“Kor Magnon is the name of this place where we stand. Long and long ago, it was the lair of a race of serpent-men who were worshippers of Sisstorississ. They stole human sacrifices to offer the snakegod, until the peoples of this region rose up and attacked it.

“Kor Magnon fell, everyone in it was put to death. From that day on, it has lain empty, abandoned, until all record of its location was forgotten.Yet Ulkarion searched for it, hampered only by the efforts of another wizard named Iphygia. Eventually, he defeated Iphygia and came here to worship Sisstorississ, so that the snake-god would make him powerful and almighty.”

The girl shrugged. “I was to have been the first sacrifice to Sisstorississ — until you came along. I — am grateful.”

Niall eyed her cautiously. “You know a lot about this magician.”

It's here that the true story of "Beyond the Wizard Fog" picks up and it's another enjoyable yarn, which, like the first appearance of Niall, has something of a surprise ending. It's too early to tell whether or not Fox will make these climactic twists a staple of his Niall of the Far Travels stories or not, since I've only read two so far. Much as I like them, I think it'd be a shame if the series devolved quickly into a formula, particularly since they already borrow so much from other sword-and-sorcery tales. At the same time, I can't deny that I really enjoyed "Beyond the Wizard Fog." It's neither deep nor original, but it is cleverly written and unpretentious. Fox clearly knew what he was about when he wrote this and that self-awareness, I think, elevates the story above mere pastiche and into the realm of genuinely enjoyable pulp fantasy.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Shadow of a Demon

It's a rare thing when two of my regular series intersect, so I take some pleasure in the fact that today's installment of Pulp Fantasy Library focuses on a short story written by Gardner F. Fox and published in the pages of Dragon -- in its second issue, no less (August 1976)!  I was just shy of my seventh birthday when this issue was released, so I didn't read it at the time. But, once I did, start to read Dragon, I was always happy to read its fiction section, which, over the years, published some excellent short stories by both established and up-and-coming writers. I like to think that my longtime fascination with the literary origins of the hobby was fueled in part by the fact that, during the time I was a regular reader and subscriber, Dragon devoted a portion of every issue to a new fantasy or science fiction story.

Gardner F. Fox needs no introduction to fans of pulp fantasy (or comic books), as his contributions to the field are well known. Strangely, this is the first time I've actually devoted an installment of this regular series to a book he's written, except for a brief one back in 2008, when I still called it "Pulp Fantasy Gallery." That's an oversight on my part I'll try to rectify over the course of 2012, since Fox was well regarded by Gary Gygax -- he makes it into Appendix N -- and because, as this entry shows, he was, like Fritz Leiber, directly connected to the early RPG hobby.

"Shadow of a Demon" introduces a new character, Niall of the Far Travels, who is depicted on the cover above. Fox describes him (and his situation at the start of the story) thusly:

He came into Angalore from the eastern deserts, a big man wearing a kaunake of spotted fur over his linkmail, his legs bare above warboots trimmed with miniver, with a sense of his own doom riding him. Niall of the Far Travels had not wanted to come to Angalore, for an old seeress had prophesied that he would be taken from this world by demons, should those warboots carry him into that ancient, brooding city.

Yet he had come here because his fate had so decreed.

He was a mercenary, a sell-sword, a barbarian out of the forested mountains of Norumbria. A wanderer by nature, he earned his keep wherever he went by the might of his sword-arm, by his skill with weapons. He feared no living thing, man or animal, though the thought of demons put a coldness down his spine.

Now he paused on the crest of a hill and stared at the city. Massive it was, and old, so old that some men said it had been here since men had first learned to walk upright. It lay between the river and the desert over which the caravans came from Sensanall to the south and Urgrik to the north. Ships lay in the little harbor that was formed by the river, riding easily to the lift and fall of its tides

If that sounds a little like a Conan pastiche to you, I wouldn't disagree. Before creating Niall, Fox had created two other Conan analogs, Kothar and Kyrik, in addition to the suspiciously named Crom the Barbarian, about whom I've talked before. So, it's not entirely surprising to see Fox create yet another barbarian sell-sword for his Dragon series (yes, series: there were ten short stories published in its pages between 1976 and 1981). Like many pulp fantasists, his strength as a writer was not in his characters but in his ideas and in the zest with which he tells his tales.

"Shadow of a Demon" is no different in this respect, telling what would appear to be a fairly banal tale of a mercenary adventurer seeking to avail himself of a fabled treasure hidden in the dungeons beneath an evil wizard's castle. Adding to the seeming cliche, Niall even encounters a mysterious, beautiful young woman to whom he is attracted and who eventually finds herself a captive of the very wizard from whom he wished to steal. Yet, as is so often the case in short fantasy fiction, not all is as it seems, including the seeming cliches. Fox is playing with his readers' expectations, leading them to believe that his tale is in fact little more than a run-of-the-mill Conan knock-off. That's certainly what I expected after the story's opening, but it didn't take long to realize that there was more at work here.

"Shadow of a Demon" is no classic for the ages, but it's a lot of fun. And while it's true that Niall of the Far Travels is mostly a cipher, the situation in which he finds himself is intriguing and Fox tells it with vigor. As I said, I never read this story back in the day, but I enjoyed it enough that I made an effort to read all the others that followed and am glad I did so. In the weeks to come, I'll be returning to Gardner Fox's Dragon stories for future installments of Pulp Fantasy Library. They're well worth a look, if you can find them.

Crom the Barbarian!

Numbered amongst Gardner Fox's many comic writings is a sword-and-sorcery tale called "Crom the Barbarian!," which appeared in the June 1950 issue of Out of This World. The story borrows heavily (and shamelessly) from Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age for ideas and names, so it's not exactly a work of art. Still, it's one of the earliest S&S comics in existence and I thought others might get a kick out of it. Here's the first page:

You can see scans of the whole story here, in this thread at the official Conan forums, where poster Theaganes made them available. "Crom the Barbarian!" is in the public domain, too, so if anyone out there is looking for a hot property to base their next old school RPG on, feel free to make use of this one.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Sword of the Sorcerer

Gardner Fox is a name that doesn't get mentioned very often by pulp fantasy aficionados these days, which is odd considering both how much he wrote and how influential his writings were. Fox may be better remembered in the comics world, where he was responsible for creating (or re-imagining) not only some of its best loved characters but also some of its key concepts . Among Fox's many contributions to comics are: Sandman (the original one, not the angsty Neil Gaiman version), The Flash, Hawkman, Dr. Fate, the Justice Society and Justice League of America, and the very idea of a multiverse of parallel worlds, as well as many others too numerous to mention (though you should feel free to do so in the comments below).

Fox was a energetic polymath, who wrote widely over five decades, from the 1930s to the 1980s, with some of his work even appearing in the pages of Dragon. And while his comics work is not only better known but better regarded, I think it criminal that his swords-and-sorcery work is mostly forgotten. Take, for example, his character of Kothar, who made his debut in a 1969 collection entitled, Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman, one of whose stories, "The Sword of the Sorcerer," I'll be discussing in this entry. On first glance, one might reasonably assume that Kothar is just another Conan knock-off, and it's true that there are many similarities between Robert E. Howard's Cimmerian and Fox's own barbaric protagonist. Upon reading these tales, though, what one soon discovers is that there's more than a touch of Vance's The Dying Earth or Smith's tales of Zothique in the Kothar yarns, too. Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman begins with a prolog, which purports to be an excerpt from The Lord Histories of Satoram Mandamor, a Nemedian Chronicles-like framing device that sets the scene:

The Universe is old. Old!

For ten billion years the stars of this, our galaxy, hurtled outward across the gulfs of space. For another billion years they hung suspended at the apex of their expansion.

During the past three billion years, now that the universe is contracting instead of expanding, those stars, dim and faint with age, have been collapsing in upon themselves, rushing headlong back to their beginnings and their ultimate destruction.

In time, there will be no Time.

Ages ago, as the legends say, the race of Man knew those stars and all their planets, named and visited them, and left on those planetary surfaces vast cities, great monuments to mankind's own greatness. Once, uncounted millennia before, an empire of Man was spread throughout the universe. This empire died more than a billion years ago, after which man himself sank into a state of barbarism.

Here and there on a planet man has occupied can be seen a bit of stonework which he left behind him as a reminder of past glory, or a few rocks of what had been a mighty megopolis, even some chunks of marble as a memento of forgotten art masterpieces. The rust and erosion of eon upon eon has bitten deep into mankind's creations.

Today, wherever man can be found on the planets of the dying star-suns, the very shapes of the continents on which he lives bear little resemblance to those he knew two billion years before. The oceans cover his cities, the desert sands his tombs and temples, while the fierce north wind ruffles vegetation that earlier man had never seen.

Today, man is a barbarian in a barbaric world. Man has reverted back to the childhood of his earliest years. He has forgotten his heritage, he has made new gods to replace the old. Man has outlived his glory.

And yet—to some men and women who live in the sunset years of the race has been given a power unknown to those men of an earlier age, yet a power famed and feared in the legendry of his people. For there are wizards and warlocks, sorcerers and witches in these days, and their spells and incantations are known to work malignant miracles.

There are also warriors, fighting men whose swords earn them fame and fortune, men inured to hardship and a way of life totally alien to the men of an earlier day. One such warrior was Kothar, cast up by the sea in the northlands of his world, a sellsword and a mercenary, a wencher after the women of his day, a freebooter and a thief, at times, whose sword Frostfire was a magic sword.

This is his saga…

This isn't the stuff of great literature, I won't deny, but there's nevertheless a certain raw power in it that I find appealing. Apparently Gary Gygax did as well, since, reading through "The Sword of the Sorcerer," there are a number of cases where one can see ideas that were lifted from it and incorporated into Dungeons & Dragons. Chief among these is that of an undead wizard called a lich. In Fox's story, Kothar is exploring an ancient tomb that turns out to be the final resting place of a lich named Afgorkon, whose countenance sends lesser men fleeing in fear. As it turns out, Afgorkon has been awaiting Kothar -- or at least someone like him -- to undertake a task for him.

This task is the destruction of a witch-queen and, to aid him in this, he gives to Kothar a magic sword called Frostfire. After he completes this task, Frostfire is Kothar's to keep as his fee, so long as he forsakes all other wealth, a condition Kothar considers no great burden seeing as he owns nothing but his armor and his weapon. And with that the barbarian sets off in a series of journeys that take him from one place to another as he strives to do as Afgorkon commanded him, even as he must grapple with new information that suggests he wasn't told the whole truth by the undead sorcerer.

As I said, "The Sword of the Sorcerer" is not great literature. Indeed, it comes across as more than a little ham-fisted at times, almost descending into parody. Yet, Fox's great strength as a writer as his ideas and those ideas are potent enough that I find it difficult not to enjoy the adventures of Kothar. The mixture of fantasy and science fictional elements with Howardian action in a Dying Earth-style setting is fun, a bit like a slightly more grown-up version of Thundarr the Barbarian -- but only slightly. And in my book that's a good thing.