Worlds Fantastic and Strange

  Earlier this week, Black Gate's editor, John O'Neil, posted an article about the Bantam Solomon Kane collection, "Skulls in the Stars".  I haven't looked at my copy in years (or any my old Howard books since the Del Rey's came along), but I was immediately reminded of the amazing maps drawn by Tim Kirk.  I dug them out and was happy to find I still like them.

   I'm a fan of maps, real and fantastic.  One of my most treasured books is an pre-WW I atlas my grandfather rescued from a house he was working on.  In its pages the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns still rule Central Europe and poor Anastasia remains safe in the Winter Palace.  For the time I'm reading I can almost believe a century of time hasn't passed since the book was published.
   Fantasy maps can help bring me into their author's worlds as well as my atlas transports me to pre-war Europe.  Sometimes the maps , sadly are the best part of a book with the names of strange kingdoms and landmarks calling out to me more clearly than their creator's words.
   For me, the best maps are more than just a picture in the front of the book.  They help foster the illusion that the author's world is a real one, one where things unknown lie over the horizon, where mysterious words hint at strange lands and customs.  Maps don't need to be super-detailed with every bit of blank space filled in and city-state named to be successful.  One of the best is below.

  The map from the Ace Conan editions is one of the most important and coolest maps for me.  I stared at the map for some time before I actually read any of the stories (it was my dad's battered, old copy of Conan the Warrior).  While the actual map of Hyboria is fairly lackluster, the superimposed map of the modern world made it mind-blowing for my twelve-year old self.  Suddenly Conan was elevated from a sword swinging warrior to someone who existed in some ancient, "real" time.  It was the first time I'd encountered that conceit in fantasy fiction and it's still one I'm a total sucker for.  Seeing that map I should have been ready for the wondrous mash-up of Cossack, Bantu, medieval and classical cultures that is Howard's Hyboria, but I wasn't.

   Several years later I came across Tim Kirk's rendering of Hyboria sans superimposition.  It's a beautiful map, rendered in thick, emphatic lines with well detailed mountains and I love what I assume is the "Tigress" in the bottom corner.  Without the modern map, though, even with REH's evocative kingdom names it looses some of it wonder.  Still, as I've written, I love Kirk's art.

      "Changa's Safari", by Milton Davis, is set in the lands straddling the Indian Ocean during the 15th century AD.  What I love about this map is that it refocused how I look at a certain part of the world.  In most maps the region's down and off center but here it's the focus of everything.
   One of Davis' goals with swords & soul is to throw off the usual northern European tropes in fantasy and create African ones.  The map pivots a part of the globe I've always sort of seen as secondary and makes it primary.  It left me just waiting to see what Davis would do next to reach his goal.

   
   And sometimes the map's as poor as the story.  From one of Lin Carter's "Thongor" books, this might have been drawn by a child (an untalented and fumble-fingered one).  It's as bereft of character as poor Thongor and Lemuria.  Carter was so caught up in trying to remind readers of John Carter and Conan that he never came up with anything that was uniquely Thongor.  The map's as sketchy and as lifeless as Carter's creation.
 
   Another great possession of mine is J. B. Post's "An Atlas of Fantasy".  It's one of those great seventies books like "Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials" or "The Atlas of Middle-Earth".  Post's book collects maps from myth as well as fantasy and science fiction.  Places like things like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County and Al Capp's Lower Slobbovia are also depicted.  It's a beautiful book collecting maps of many of my favorite books and stories alongside others completely unfamiliar to me.  If you like maps it's worth finding.
   All this being said, books don't need maps.  Being forced to couple the author's words with my own imagination to conjure up an image of the geographical layout can be far more satisfying than just looking at a picture.  A poor map can undercut whatever success the author's had working his/her magic in my brain.  The map in "The Sword of Shannara" springs to mind (and we can argue the merits of Terry Brooks some other day, but I readily admit to having a fairly unwarranted soft spot for at least the first batch of his books).  It's flatter and less interesting than any of his prose.
   I know there's a map of Jack Vance's "Undying Earth" out there but I don't need or want it.  It presents definite, concrete borders for a world that should only exist in Vance's fever-dream writing.
   So what do you think?  Do you like them or find them a hindrance to your own imaginations?  What are your favorite and most hated?

Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria

When writing about Swords & Sorcery one is forced to address the extremely problematic figure of Lin Carter. Perhaps no one did more to popularize the genre than Carter. He was a lover all sorts of fantasy writing but S & S seems to have been his greatest paramour.

   As an editor he created the "Flashing Swords!" series for Dell between 1973 and 1981. Over the course of five volumes he put stories by Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, Andre Norton, Jack Vance and numerous others. Reread today they contain stories that put the bloody, adrenaline soaked heart of S&S on clear display.
 
   He also created the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), a loose association of the leading practitioners of the art in the sixties through the late seventies. At least one anthology dedicated to its members was published. The association created and handed out the Gandalf Award for several years until Carter's health failed in the eighties.

   If this is all Carter did for Swords & Sorcery then his reputation would be golden and secure. Unfortunately he was also a writer. Specifically a writer with severe limitations.
 
   Carter cranked out books. In addition to the two dozen or so short story collections he edited he wrote at least fifty novels, often two or three a year. I've only read a few over the years and they've all tended toward the bad. It's few writers who can keep up that sort of output and match it to any degree of quality and Lin Carter didn't.

   The other great problem with Carter's writing was caused by the fact that he was an extreme enthusiast about Sword & Sorcery and pulp adventure stories. What he wasn't was a man given to original characters or plots.

   The result is that his stories are mostly pastiches (off Burroughs, Howard, Lovecraft, and Robeson in particular). His Lovecraftian stories in particular seem to exist only to string Mythos names together instead of actually striving to generate some sort of actual atmosphere of dread and apprehension.

   Which brings me to "Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria". It was his first published novel (after years of short story writing) and the version I'm reading is one he revised and polished years after its 1965 debut. In a word, it's bad. Ok, two words, very bad.

   Thongor is a black maned barbarian from the northlands of Lemuria, ca. 1,000,000 BC. who dashes from one bloody episode to another.
Carter's Lemuria is a mix of Robert E. Howard's Valusia and Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoom. There's both magic and super science and crazily named monstrous beasts (ex. the dwark). It's all the sort of genre melange that should at least be cause for a few hours of passable fun.

   It ain't. I thought I'd blow through the book in a day or two and then polish off at least the second, "Thongor and the Dragon City", over the next two or so days. So far it hasn't happened. For research purposes I will trudge my way though all five Thongor books but I don't look forward to it.

   I don't need the best writing from a pulp story but it needs to move. At times the very sentences worked to slow down my reading: "He hurled himself through the jungle at the utmost speed possible, seeking the thickest-grown places wherethrough the jungle dragon might be slowed in seeking to crush passage." That faux-archaic collection of words and diction is typical of the book's writing. The placement and selection of words seems calculated to slow down the reader's brain processes.

   There's no noticeable emotion invested in the writing. When you read Howard or Leiber their own opinions come through loudly and clearly. The only thing I can detect here is Carter's desire to write his own stories but an inability to actually come up with anything that wasn't done earlier by someone better.


NEXT: John Jakes' "Brak the Barbarian"