Midling Fantasy Series: The Shadow Library Re-Organized

 

A Voice for Princess; The Questing of Kedrigern; Kedrigern in Wanderland; Kedrigern and the Charming Couple; A Remembrance for Kedrigern … John Morressy

The Dark Tide; Shadows of Doom; The Darkest Day; Trek to Kraggen-Cor; The Brega Path … Dennis McKiernan

Another Fine Myth; Myth Adventures; Myth-ing Persons … Robert Lynn Asprin               

The Elfstones of Shannara; The Wishsong of Shannara; Magic Kingdom for Sale – Sold! … Terry Brooks

The White Hart; The Golden Swan; The Black Beast; The Silver Sun; The Sable Moon … Nancy Springer

The River of the Dancing Gods; Demons of the Dancing Gods; Vengeance of the Dancing Gods; Songs of the Dancing Gods … Jack L. Chalker

The Lure of the Basilisk; The Seven Altars of DuSarra; The Sword of Bheleu; The Book of Silence; The Misenchanted Sword … Lawrence Watt-Evans

Dragons of Autumn Twilight; Dragons of Winter Night; Dragons of Spring Dawning … Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman

The Summer Tree; The Wandering Fire; The Darkest Road … Guy Gavriel Kay

Pawn of Prophecy; Queen of Sorcery; Magician’s Gambit; Castle of Wizardry; Enchanter’s End Game … David Eddings

The Exploits of Ebenezum … Craig Shaw Gardner

Spellsinger; The Hour of the Gate; The Day of the Dissonance; The Moment of the Magician; The Paths of the Perambulator; The Time of the Transference … Alan Dean Foster

The Sword and the Satchel; The Elves and the Otterskin; The Thrall and the Dragon’s Heart; The Wizard and the Warlord; The Troll’s Grindstone … Elizabeth Boyer

The Time of the Dark; The Walls of Air; The Armies of Daylight; The Silent Tower; The Silicon Mage… Barbara Hambly

• [Candace looks at a row of books on a table] 

Candace : Boring, dull, stupid, lame, heavy-handed and derivative.

Mom : Oh, thank you for those insightful reviews of books... you haven't read.

Candace : Mom, that's why books have covers - to judge them. I mean, why did you choose these books from the library?

Candace : They looked … interesting.

Candace : [gesturing]  So...

Mom : Point taken.   –- Phineas and Ferb

 

Man, back in the Eighties I wanted to be the Fantasy Guy, at least in the little circle of people I knew. I had already found my delight in established tales of magic and adventure; now I wanted to be in on the ground floor of any new works that might arise. Imaginative Literature was undergoing a surge in popularity and was even being granted some relevance. I scoured my places of resource and tried to decide where to spend my meager funds.

Sometimes the cover was a deciding factor. If it had art by the Brothers Hildebrandt or Darrell K. Sweet or even Carl Lundgren, that was a strike in its favor. If it was also a Del Rey book, that earned it strong consideration. And, of course, subject matter counted. If it had a wizard or a dragon or reasonable facsimiles thereof, you could bet I studied it before deciding to lay any dollars down.

But the reason I would continue a series could be most unreasonable. Often if I had a mildly engaging encounter with the first volume of a series, I would follow it with diminishing returns, hoping it would improve until I would finally abandon it. Sometimes the mild engagement would continue until I realized it wasn’t going anywhere or doing anything new anymore. Sometimes I hadn’t even read the first volume but kept buying in the fear that I would like the series and then be hopelessly behind. And then when I had them, decades passed when there seemed no reason to sell them.

As I have said elsewhere, there are good books here and there I wouldn’t mind still having. Some of the series I never completed: I know there are at least two more volumes in the Spellsinger series, and Watt-Evans’ The Misenchanted Sword is just the tip of a very big iceberg, and as for Dennis McKiernan …! Even so, I have no urge to complete the cycles. I don’t know how I ever managed to avoid “The Wheel of Time” series that started in the early Nineties and which I would almost certainly categorize here; it seems wearisome to me in so many ways. But then I have long ago given up my pretensions to be the Fantasy Guy and need not read anything that doesn’t really appeal to me, just to give an opinion. Robert Jordan’s books seem very popular and have made a lot of money and some people have dedicated decades of fandom to it; I leave it at that.

Young Frankenstein: The Shadow Library

 

Young Frankenstein, a Novel by Gilbert Pearlman Based on the Screenplay by Gene Wilder & Mel Brooks

Back in the day, the closest you could come to owning a movie were these tie-in adaptations. And of course, in 1974, this was a film considered too 'adult' and 'bawdy' for us kids to be allowed to see. Sometime in the 80's, I think, when I had seen the movie, I bought the book (even VHS was still too expensive) and found it to have the usual flaws of an adaptation. It did not have the timing of the film, which is of course the essence of a comedy. It included things from the script that had been cut from the movie (and you could see why) and parts that you knew were just 'festoons' that Pearlman had put in to try be funny (in his own way). A while back when you could get a cheap DVD copy, I sold the book in a batch of others to Half Price Books for the usual pittance. I see now that even a 'good' copy is going for $30. Go figure.

Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Shadow Library Re-Organized

 

Lest Darkness Fall … L. Sprague de Camp

The Fallible Fiend … L. Sprague de Camp

The Goblin Tower; The Clocks of Iraz; The Unbeheaded King; The Honorable Barbarian … L. Sprague de Camp

The Complete Compleat Enchanter …L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

The Enchanter Reborn … L. Sprague de Camp & Christopher Stasheff

Land of Unreason ... L. Sprague De Camp & Fletcher Pratt

The Blue Star … Fletcher Pratt

The Well of the Unicorn … Fletcher Pratt

H. P. Lovecraft: A Biography … L. Sprague de Camp

A Midsummer Tempest … Poul Anderson

Hrolf Kraki’s Saga … Poul Anderson

Three Hearts and Three Lions … Poul Anderson

The Moon’s Fire-Eating Daughter … John Myers Myers

Mention My Name in Atlantis … John Jakes

Swords and Deviltry; Swords Against Death; Swords in the Mist; Swords Against Wizardry; The Swords of Lankhmar; Swords and Ice Magic … Fritz Leiber (but not those last two in the picture)

If I speak of Robert E. Howard and Conan, can L. Sprague De Camp (1907 – 2000) be far behind? Part of the heroic and foundational nerds of the Fifties and Sixties (although his career began in the Thirties), I always picture him in the intellectual regalia of the time: horn-rimmed glasses, a cigarette holder, a goatee, and two-piece plaid suits. In his professional career as an aeronautical engineer, he worked with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. What follows is a patchwork of facts from Wikipedia:

“De Camp was a founding member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), a loosely knit group of Heroic fantasy writers that was founded during the 1960s and led by Lin Carter, with entry by credentials as a fantasy writer alone … De Camp and his wife moved to Plano, Texas, in 1989, and Sprague de Camp died there on November 6, 2000 …  L. Sprague de Camp is credited with [the word “extraterrestrial] first usage as a noun with the meaning of "alien life" and with coining the abbreviation "E.T." in the first part of his two-part article "Design for Life", published in the May 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction …  

“De Camp was a materialist who wrote works examining society, history, technology and myth. He published numerous short stories, novels, non-fiction works and poems during his long career … De Camp had the mind of an educator, and a common theme in many of his works is a corrective impulse regarding similar previous works by other authors. A highly rational and logical thinker, he was frequently disturbed by what he regarded as logical lapses and absurdities in others' writings.

“De Camp was best known for his light fantasy, particularly two series written in collaboration with Pratt, the Harold Shea stories (from 1940 et seq.) and Gavagan's Bar (from 1950) … He was also known for his sword and sorcery, a fantasy genre revived partly by his editorial work on and continuation of Robert E. Howard's Conan cycle.”

De Camp’s autobiographies and analysis of other Fantasy authors’ books have been criticized as downgrading their work as compared to his personal criteria. Fantasy is a rather odd choice of genre for someone so firmly ‘materialist’ and ‘logical’, although a loose inner consistency, a ‘plausible impossible’ does help sell a magical tale. His most popular works (certainly the ones I’ve enjoyed) seem to be riding still on the coattails of Fletcher Pratt and Robert E. Howard. But he is definitely responsible for rescuing and revitalizing Howard from his pulp obscurity; it is largely due to De Camp that Conan has such a presence in pop culture today.

Included in this list are some swordsmen and sorcerers I equate with his type. I so much wanted to like Poul Anderson (1926 – 2001; also a SAGA founding member; also spent a period of his life in Texas!) from what I’d heard of him, but these books were not to be my entrance to his multifarious and award-winning work.