Langan is one of the best current cosmic horror authors, if he's successful here he might become a contender for one of the best current weird fiction authors period, so I'm rather eager to know if this was a fruitful endeavor.

I'm looking for some help deciding between one of two collections of Solomon Kane. I'm not sure if I should get The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane or Solomon Kane: The Original Comics Omnibus Vol. 1. Is one better than the other and does one have a more complete collection? Any help would be appreciated.

Found this in my inbox this morning. Looks like I'll be adding to my Icon Conan figure.

More people should be aware of this brilliant essay from Poul Anderson, which begins in part with the following pastiche.

I recommend reading the thing for the brutal 😂

“With one stroke of his fifty-pound sword, Gnorts the Barbarian lopped off the head of Nialliv the Wizard.

It flew through the air, still sneering, while Gnorts clove two royal guardsmen from vizor through breasplate to steel jockstrap.

As he whirled to escape, an arrow glanced off his own chainmail.

Then he was gone from the room, into the midnight city. Easily outrunning pursuit, he took a few sentries at the gate by surprise.

For a moment, arms and legs hailed around him through showers of blood; then he had opened the gate and was free.

A caravan of merchants, waiting to enter at dawn, was camped nearby.

Seeing a magnificent stallion tethered, Gnorts released it, twisted the rope into a bridle, and rode it off bareback.

After galloping several miles, he encountered a mounted patrol that challenged him.

Immediately he plunged into the thick of the cavalrymen, swinging his blade right and left with deadly effect, rearing up his steed to bring its forefeet against one knight who dared to confront him directly.

Then it was only to gallop onward.

Winter winds lashed his body, attired in nothing more than a bearskin kilt, but he ignored the cold.

Sunrise revealed the shore and his waiting longship.”

Obviously, this is meant as genre parody — the essay explains raucously and at length about these types of inaccuracies and outrageous exaggerations of weapons and physical endurance …..

I really recommend that you read, and marvel at, the linked essay itself, but this is the tone of what follows that hilarious opener:

QUOTE BELOW 👇

“Beneath the magic, derring-do, and other glamour, an imaginary world has to work right.

In particular, a pre-industrial society, which is what virtually all hf uses for a setting, differs from ours today in countless ways.

A writer need not be a walking encyclopedia to get most of these straight. A reasonable amount of research, or sometimes merely a reasonable amount of logical thinking, will do it for him.

Let’s consider a few points. A proper discussion would require a book, but we can make a start.”

QUOTE ABOVE 👆

I hope that this post can raise the awareness level on this beautiful and hilariously funny and genuinely insightful novella of an essay. 😃

What do you make of the essay, and have you seen it before?

I recently finished Swords and Deviltry from the First Book of Lankhmar and started Swords Against Death. I had already finished all the REH Conan stories so I chose this as my next step, and those three stories that told the backstories of Mouse and Fafhrd and their meeting in Lankhmar really surprised me.

I had already heard that Leiber had very good prose and was heavy on the humor, and both were true. But when I later decided to look up more after finishing the first book, it really surprised me how those were the elements everyone seemed to highlight the most, when there is so much more evident right there from the start. Fafhrd and Mouse are complex and very troubled individuals. I empathized with Fafhrd's frustration towards the life in his tribe and his love for Vlana as a catalyst to escape that life, Mouse's rage at losing his master and Ivrian's self-hatred for being a weak-willed coward as a result of his father's rule of fear at their household. Yet when they escape their situations and meet together and each other's lovers in Ill Met In Lankhmar, you can truly see them for what they are: Young, naive and short-sighted.

Fafhrd escaped the ice women to help Vlana get her vengeance on the Thieves Guild, yet in doing so he just locked himself in another cell, because he secretly begins to resent Vlana's fanaticism in her objective and wishes they could just forget all about it. Ivrian proved she could be brave for the Mouser, yet in spoiling and isolating her the Mouser just keeps her as her old, weak-willed self without chance for growth. In all that they bond together as friends, and with the death of both their lovers that bond just strengthens when each become all the other has left.

It surprised me because Conan never had this level of depth at all. Conan is a complex and compelling character for sure, and he doesn't always do what is right and struggles often, but overall he feels like a very idealized human. His stoicism and expertice at everything he does is something hard to picture yourself as, ever. All troughout his life he seems very stable in all his convictions and almost never do we see him make stupid choices or be uncertain about what he wants to be or do at all. That's undoubtably part of the appeal for many readers, but Leiber's heroes feel really different because you can see how flawed they are, and they make very reprehensible choices and decisions. Conan also does, but almost never does the story treat them as such. Meanwhile Fafhrd is seen acting out of irrational passion, drunkenness, arrogance, and just straight up >!kills a young boy while getting his revenge on the Guild.!<

I've heard the later works aren't as good or are just straight up bad compared to the early ones, so I'll have to see for myself. I made this post in part to start discussion and in part to get me to read more because I've struggling a bit with reading lately, so I'd like to hear what you guys think about that.

Cynthia Ward follows up on her essay on Reactor: Bored of the Swords: The Rebirth of Sword & Sorcery and the Death of the Weird with a review of Battleborn #1 for Black Gate Magazine.

"The excision of the distaff half from S&S. The male-only contributors. The putdowns of the female-coded cozy fantasy and romantasy subgenres. The invocations and semiotics of the modern military.

With Battleborn — if I have it right — [editor Sean CW] Korsgaard is presenting S&S as men’s adventure.

It is not.

Men’s adventure is a different category (“genre” would be the wrong term here).

To conflate S&S with this category ignores a fairly significant chunk of S&S work, S&S history, and the S&S audience.

To be sure, S&S is read and created more by males than by females or by enbies. I’d never cavil at anyone who said so. S&S does appeal more to men.

But that’s a very different thing than positing S&S as “men’s literature.”

I have many feels over this, O my comrades-in-arms.

But you know what my dominant emotion is?

A feeling of betrayal by a sword-brother."

I know Kull and Mak Morn interact. However, it seems like Conan's Picts are different and Bran Mak Morn is more of a historical fiction vein. I've heard differing thoughts.