Robert E. Howard – Page 24

The SFFaudio Podcast #126 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Statement Of Randolph Carter by H.P. Lovecraft

Podcast

The SFFaudio Podcast #126 – a complete and unabridged reading of The Statement Of Randolph Carter by H.P. Lovecraft, read by Wayne June (from the Audio Realms collection The Dark Worlds Of H.P. Lovecraft – Volume 3), followed by a discussion of the story. Participants include Jesse, Scott, Tamahome, Jenny Colvin (of the Reading Envy blog) and Mr. Jim Moon (of Hypnogoria.com).

Talked about on today’s show:
H.P. Lovecraft never played soccer?, Mr. Wayne June is the voice of Lovecraft, Michael Clarke Duncan has a swarthy voice, Pat Bottino’s voice might work for Lovecraft, Tama was a Lovecraft virgin until The Statement Of Randolph Carter, The Statement Of Randolph Carter is a good place to start with Lovecraft, forbidden writings, nameless things with many adjectives, Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart, a radical thesis: Harley Warren is a mean practical joker, Jesse renders the story meaningless, The Turn Of The Screw, Big Cypress Swamp, Florida, Imprisoned With The Pharaohs, alligator-men, secret places and cultists, legion (many – demons – The New Testament), The Lovecraft Vocabulary Challenge, necrophagous niter, The Cask Of Amontillado, did Randolph Carter cover up that tomb?, using The Statement Of Randolph Carter for vocabulary expansion, “hoary”, adding horror, The Silver Key, Randolph Carter is an occult thrill seeker, “we’re one lid away from total doom”, I don’t find books of forgotten lore in used bookstores, Harry Houdini’s book on the occult had an introduction written by Lovecraft!, Lovecraft’s letters, the Call Of Cthulhu RPG works differently than other RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons, From Beyond, Re-Animator, Herbert West Re-animator, it’s such a cute little horror, showing Lovecraft on screen may be best done humorously, dripping oozing ichor, China Miéville, piling on the connotations, bringing home the horror, “it was an eldritch night and I was feeling squamous”, night terrors, Tama had a nightmare that DC was going to relaunch all their comics, “Warren is calling”, what does a gelatinous voice sound like? it’s a rip-of from Poe, The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar, hypnotism, Warren’s theory about why certain corpses say fat and firm, Demons by John Shirley, The Unnameable, a funny riposte, “your giant zombie theory doesn’t work”, In The Mouth Of Madness, The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft, The New Cthulhu, Robert E. Howard, The Black Stone, Clark Ashton Smith, Conan lives in a Lovecraftian universe, Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, The People Of The Dark, Worms Of The Earth, Howard’s non-Lovecraftian horror, Pigeons From Hell, Howard was a collector of words and ideas, what’s the Mongolian word for sword?, Cimmeria was a real place, Lovecraft was a crafter of stories whereas Howard was a storyteller, Lovecraft’s poetry, yellow peril, The Horror At Red Hook, raging racist, respectable white folks turning into fish people, Clive Barker, “you’re one puzzle box away from doom”, dark fantasy, hidden secret magical worlds.

The Statement Of Randolph Carter by H.P. Lovecraft - illustration by Andrew Brosnatch

The Statement Of Randolph Carter

The Statement Of Randolph Carter scene in Providence, issue 8

The Statement Of Randolph Carter Illustration by Pete Von Sholly

Posted by Jesse Willis

Gods Of The North by Robert E. Howard

SFFaudio Online Audio

“Anybody ought to be willing to pay a dollar for the privilege of reading, for a whole year, the works of Lovecraft, Smith, and Derleth.”

-Robert E. Howard (from a letter to Fantasy Fan, December 1933)

“I am so happy that we were able to quickly clear up this misunderstanding. We have accepted Orion’s apology without reservation and I thank our lawyers, and Orion’s lawyers, on both sides of the Atlantic for helping us resolve our issues. Orion was a great licensee of ours for many years and we are delighted to have reached an agreement to renew and expand that relationship. We are already brainstorming the many new productive ways we can work together in the future. Those of us who work at Paradox have put a lot of work into protecting and developing our wide array of Robert E. Howard derived brands since we got into the Robert E. Howard business. The new Conan movie will wrap next month, the Age of Conan MMOG recently launched a big expansion, and we are well along in the development of a number of other feature films and licensed products which we will be announcing shortly. Orion is perfectly positioned as a leading science fiction/fiction publisher which can provide the wider audience we want to reach the real thing, REH’s original stories”

-Fredrik Malmberg, President and CEO of Paradox Entertainment, Inc. and its subsidiaries (Conan Properties International) (from a 2010 press release)

Gods Of The North, first published in 1934, is still just one of two Conan stories available on LibriVox.org (the other being Red Nails). Gods Of The North is a 3,500 word vignette, it’s been republished under the titles The Frost Giant’s Daughter and The Frost King’s Daughter. The reason it survives, and is known today, has nothing to do with marketing campaigns, intellectual property protection or lawyers. It survives for one reason alone – it survives because of it’s fans. In fact, it survives despite it being originally written as a piece for sale. It was actually rejected by Weird Tales magazine editor Farnsworth Wright:

The Frost-Giant's Daughter Rejection Letter

Check it out… Gods Of The North was first published in a fan magazine (that had just sixty subscribers) – a fan magazine that counted both H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard among its feature (and letters column) contributors. Neither Lovecraft nor Howard wrote to, or for, THE FANTASY FAN because it was a profitable venture – they wrote to it, and for it, because they were themselves fans of fantasy and the stories and poems they were weaving. You may know the story. It’s a pretty famous one today, but it isn’t famous because it was a well marketed, properly licensed by the right’s holder, or branded. It is, instead, because it’s a good story that fans (another word for readers) appreciate.

Gods Of The North was nearly forgotten. It lay un-reprinted and virtually unknown for more than thirty years until it was re-discovered and reprinted in the December 1956 issue of Fantastic Universe. Here is the editorial introduction for that reprinting:

The publication of this strange story by Robert E. Howard, author of the Conan stories, so much a part of the Living Library of Fantasy, represents a departure for this magazine. Without abandoning our policy of bringing you, month after month, the best in NEW Science Fiction and Fantasy. We will, front time to time, publish material such as this, hitherto known to only a few students of the field! GODS OF THE NORTH was published in 1934, in Charles D. Hornig’s THE FANTASY FAN, which had a circulation of under a hundred! We thank Sam Moskowitz, Editor and SF historian, who showed us this story.

Here’s the |PDF|, it’s also available (with a slightly different text) at |WIKISOURCE|

Here’s my description of the plot:

A winter war in the mountains of Vanaheim, and a bit of gossamer, are all that stand between Conan of Cimmeria and the frosty beauty who spurns him.

And here’s the audiobook:

Gods of the North
By Robert E. Howard; Read by Rowdy Delaney
1 |MP3| – Approx. 21 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: September 21, 2008
She drew away from him, dwindling in the witch·fire of the skies, until she was a figure no bigger than a child. First published in the March 1934 issue of The Fantasy Fan.

Here’s the same reading, with additional commentary:

Podcastle #162 – Gods Of The North
By Robert E. Howard; Read by Rowdy Delaney
1 |MP3| – Approx. 30 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Podcastle
Podcast: June 21, 2011

My copy of Conan’s Brethren (a Gollancz collection of Howard stories), edited by Stephen Jones, features this striking image by Les Edwards (aka Edward Miller):

The Frost King's Daughter - illustration by Les Edwards

Comics adaptations:

Savage Tales #1 (May 1971) – The first comics adaptation, adapted by Roy Thomas (writer) and Barry Windsor Smith (artist):

Savage Tales - The Frost Giant's Daughter

Conan the Barbarian #16 (July 1972) – a colorized version of the ST #1 adaptation, except with Comics Code Authority self-censorship and an additional splash page:

Conan The Barbarian - Night Of The Frost Giants

Savage Sword of Conan #1 (August 1974) – an uncoloured and uncensored (full nudity is back) version of the same adaptation from Conan The Barbarian #16 and Savage Tales #1, but featuring the added splash page (in black and white this time) from CTB #16:

The Savage Sword Of Conan - ADDED SPLASH (in black and white) - The Frost Giant's Daughter

Conan #2 (March 2004) adapted by Kurt Busiek (writer) and Cary Nord (artist) – cover art by Joseph Michael Linsner:

Dark Horse - Conan #2 - The Frost Giant's Daughter - COVER

Conan #2 - The Frost Giant's Daughter - INTERIOR

But the fan connection doesn’t end there. The artist most closely associated with the Marvel Comics run of Conan The Barbarian and Savage Sword Of Conan was John Buscema. But, he never illustrated an adaptation of Gods Of The North or The Frost Giant’s Daughter. And so it was up to fan artists, like the impressively talented Benito Gallego, to step in to imagine what a Buscema version of this fan favourite tale might look like. And he did it twice!

Benito Gellago's illustrations of The Frost Giant's Daughter

[Thanks to Robert E. Howard, Charles D. Horning, Sam Moskowitz, Hans Stefan Santesson, Rowdy Delaney, Gorgon776 and many other fans]

Posted by Jesse Willis

Power Records adaptation of Conan The Barbarian (the 1982 Motion Picture directed by John Milius)

SFFaudio News

Back in 2007 Akim Bischoff wrote our review of the Power Records adaptation of Conan The Barbarian (the 1982 Motion Picture directed by John Milius) |READ OUR REVIEW|. Based on the character created by Robert E. Howard, it was the longest audio dramatization of a Conan story up to that point (it wasn’t surpassed until BrokenSea Audio’s Queen Of The Black Coast – currently available via torrent HERE). Akim concluded his review this way:

My only gripe with the record adaptation is I wish it featured the film’s original score. While the orchestration Power Records uses is vast and surprisingly well done, it’s hard to stand against the classic work of composer Basil Poledouris. Though, with their excellent cast and matching production values, this can be easily overlooked. Especially when listening to the “new” dialog and scenes ultimately left on the cutting room floor. As a fan of all things Conan and especially the films, it creates quite a thrill and leaves you slightly imagining… what might have been.

Now you can hear the entire recording, in five parts, as posted to YouTube:

Here is the same audio dramatization but with some of the Marvel comics adaptation added:

[Thank CROM!]

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Black Stone by Robert E. Howard

SFFaudio Online Audio

Robert E. Howard's The Black Stone - art by Gene Day

The Black Stone is one of Robert E. Howard’s Cthulhu Mythos stories. I happen to think it’s is one of his best – which is saying something because Robert E. Howard was an absolutely terrific Horror writer. I probably first encountered it as an adaption, it was a backup story written by Roy Thomas and illustrated by Gene Day in the March 1982 issue of Savage Sword Of Conan (#74). That was actually quite a spectacular issue of the magazine and the The Black Stone, which only took up ten pages, was wonderful. FNH has posted a two part reading of the story to his Cthulhu podcast and it’s well read too:

The Black Stone
By Robert E. Howard; Read by FNH
2 MP3 Files – Approx. 41 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Cthulhu Podcast
Podcast: July 2011
|ETEXT|
A biliophile, with extensive knowledge of history, anthropology and ancient religion, reads of a forgotten geological feature in the mountains of Hungary. He decides to take his vacation there, mid-summer, and encounters legend, history and a terrible manifestation from an unspeakably distant epoch. First published in the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales.

Part 1 |MP3| Part 2 |MP3|

Podcast feed:

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/cthulhupodcast

Here’s another reading, from a cool podcast I’ve just discovered. I expect to be listening to a lot more episodes from it:

The Black Stone
By Robert E. Howard; Read by Jim Moon
1 |MP3| – Approx. 56 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Hypnobobs
Podcast: January 23, 2011
A biliophile, with extensive knowledge of history, anthropology and ancient religion, reads of a forgotten geological feature in the mountains of Hungary. He decides to take his vacation there, mid-summer, and encounters legend, history and a terrible manifestation from an unspeakably distant epoch. First published in the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales.

Podcast feed: http://hypnogoria.podomatic.com/rss2.xml

The Black Stone is also available in print. The Ballantine Del Rey collection titled The Horror Stories Of Robert E. Howard (ISBN: 0345490207) was released as an audiobook edition available from Tantor Media (read by Robertson Dean):

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard
By Robert E. Howard; Read by Robertson Dean
2 MP3-CDs – Approx. 24 hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Tantor Audiobooks
Published: 2010
ISBN:
Sample |MP3|

And of course there have been several other talented artistic interpretations of The Black Stone, here’s just a few:

The Black Stone - illustrated by Greg Staples

The Black Stone - illustrated by Lee Brown Coye (from Sleep No More)

Wolfshead cover illustration by Paul Lehr

Wolfshead cover illustration by Paul Lehr

The Black Stone - art by Jim & Ruth Keegan

The Black Stone - art by Jim & Ruth Keegan

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Fire Of Asshurbanipal by Robert E. Howard

SFFaudio Online Audio

If you’re looking to add a Robert E. Howard story to your reading library, but don’t want to get started down the Conan path, look no farther than The Fire Of Asshurbanipal. It was the cover story for the December 1936 issue of Weird Tales!

Weird Tales December 1936 - The Fire Of Asshurbanipal by Robert E. Howard

WEIRD TALES The Fire Of Asshurbanipal - illustration by J. Allen St. John

The Fire Of Asshurbanipal was sold posthumously to Weird Tales by Howard’s father, then the only surviving member of Howard’s immediate family. The story features a pair of adventurers. One is an American, named Steve Clarney, and the other is an Afghan named Yar Ali. They make a fun pair.

Eric Wilkerson‘s depiction of Clarney, for the Call of Cthulhu Collectible Card Game, makes Clarney look like Indiana Jones (minus the whip), and that’s not wholly wrong. But Clarney isn’t an archaeologist, though he and Yar Ali are treasure hunters, and the period and setting is pretty close.

Eric Wilkerson's depiction of Steve Clarney

It is available in print as a part of easily the Ballantine Del Rey collection called The Horror Stories Of Robert E. Howard (ISBN: 0345490207); there was also a pair of deluxe releases by Subterranean Press. And most importantly there is a wonderful professionally narrated audiobook edition available from Tantor Media (it’s read by the talented Robertson Dean):

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard
By Robert E. Howard; Read by Robertson Dean
2 MP3-CDs – Approx. 24 hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Tantor Audiobooks
Published: 2010
ISBN:
Sample |MP3|

The paper editions feature two stunning images from the story by Greg Staples.

The Fire Of Asshurbanipal as illustrated by Greg Staples

The Fire Of Asshurbanipal art by Greg Staples

Interestingly, a different version of the same novelette, The Fire of Asshurbanipal, was published in more recent times as a straight adventure story (same characters but minus the supernatural elements). That fantasy-free version and can be found in another Ballantine Del-Rey collection entitled El Borak And Other Desert Adventures (ISBN: 034550545X).

El Borak And Other Desert Adventures

And that one includes wondrous illustrations by the master of comic book covers Tim Bradstreet.

The Fire Of Asshurbanipal illustration by Tim Bradstreet

And the version available on Gutenberg Australia’s website is, of course, the original Weird Tales version, complete with references to the Necronomicon, Yog-Sothoth and other sundry Cthulhu mythos details. And that’s the version which has recently been podcast by FNH’s Cthulhu Podcast.

I think I first read this story about twenty-five years ago, and remembered it as a gripping adventure yarn with a fairly strong Lovecraftian feel. I picked it up second hand, in a used bookstore in a handsomely covered collection of ‘weird’ Howard stories called Wolfshead (ISBN: 055312353X). In that 1979 book, there is an excellent introduction by Robert Bloch in which he argues that the “stylistic excesses” found in Howard’s stories, like The Fire Of Asshurbanipal, can be “easily excused” because within Howard’s writing “lurks a dark poetry, and the timeless truth of dreams.”

That still sounds right to me. The Fire Of Asshurbanipal is exciting, happily and ornately adjectival, and carries about with it a heft that most adventure fiction can’t really come close to matching. Listening to this podcast edition I’ll admit it possesses a raw power that I still appreciate even today, much later in life. What jars most, of course, is the prominent position given to race, the reliance on instinctual knowledge, and the repeated use of jungle cat metaphors (which feel particularly out of place in the Arabian desert setting).

Over on the Black Gate blog Ryan Harvey argues that The Fire Of Asshurbanipal is cut from the same cloth as H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King. I agree.

If you’re looking for more stories like The Fire Of Asshurbanipal I highly recommend another novelette, of more recent vintage, that follows in the tradition very well – That’d be Charles Ardai’s Nor Idolatry Blind the Eye (available in audio as a part of the Audio Realms audiobook Hunt Through The Cradle Of Fear |READ OUR REVIEW| and as an |ETEXT|).

For those who are more comics inclined, check out Joseph Remy’s 40 page webcomic adaptation of The Fire Of Asshurbanipal which begins |HERE|.

And in case you were wondering, the Asshurbanipal of the title was a 7th century BC Neo-Assyrian king famed for the creation of the Library of Ashurbanipal which held among its collection the Epic Of Gilgamesh. It is reported that Alexander the Great, upon seeing the great library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, was himself inspired to create his own library and that one became perhaps the most famous library of all.

Detail from the Paul Lehr’s cover for Wolfshead:

Wolfshead cover illustration by Paul Lehr

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #114

Podcast

The SFFaudio Podcast #114 – Scott, Jesse and Tamahome talk about recent arrivals and new releases

Talked about on today’s show:
SFFaudio gets ‘slashdotted’ by Windows Weekly, get Go The F To Sleep for free (and see video), Scott’s stack of new audiobooks (2:15), The Initiate Brother by Sean Russell has a nice cover, Farnham’s Freehold by Robert A. Heinlein, time travel with nuclear bombs, castration, Dark Mist Rising by Anna Kendall has no tattoos, Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okarafor is heavy, Nnedi was on Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, should we have note timestamps? (13:41?), Luke does notes like us on his new podcast, discussions are more fun than interviews, can you link to a time offset of an mp3?, youtube subtitles, search the text in podcasts (podzinger or podscope?), the Warriors anthology by Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin is split up (into 3 actually), A Game of Thrones tv show, Peter Dinklage rocks as Tyrion, Warriors audiobook could be an Sffaudio Essential, Shadowchaser by Alexey Pehov is Russian fantasy, Kevin Hearne’s Hounded (cover) and Hexed, hopefully they’re fantasy, a triptych from Harry Harrison: The Stainless Steel Rat Sings The Blues (#8), The Stainless Steel Rat Goes To Hell (#9), and The Stainless Steel Rat Joins The Circus (#10), what’s the right order??, John Barnes’s Daybreak Zero, pay attention!, Selected Stories Of Philip K. Dick (vol 1 & 2), Jesse’s big paper stack (32:34), graphic novels: Locke & Key Volume 1: Welcome To Lovecraft by Joe Hill (it’s not just one issue, I was wrong), Invincible by Robert Kirkman (creator of The Walking Dead) , “his mom would see those heads being chopped off”, Fresh Ink comics review video podcast, Robert E. Howard’s Savage Sword, Jesse got some nice book deals (36:14), Jolly Olde Bookstore received $12,000 worth of books, Star Science Fiction Stories #3, The Best of Henry Kuttner, 4 Philip K. Dick Ace Doubles, also finished Ex Machina (graphic novel) by Brian K. Vaughan, the series that isn’t Y: The Last Man, Runaways, The Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones — interviewed on I Should Be Writing #202, some ‘dirty’ magazines, more Scott stuff (45:55), Scott on LibraryThing.com, LibraryThing Early Reviewers, The Generation Starship in Science Fiction by Simone Caroti, Heinlein generation starship novel (it’s Orphans of the Sky), Wall-E, Scott starts new releases (51:23), Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey, fantasy author name and science fiction author name, “system opera”, The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon (about autism), Chicks Kick Butt anthology, no list of short story titles…again, different urban fantasy butts, Audible micro-credits?, our weekly plead to get Ted Chiang on Audible, Free Apocalypse Al, Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris gets a direct translation (before it was Polish->French->English), The Cyberiad robot short stories, wait…Jesse has more books (59:19), We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, lured by the introduction, Other Worlds, Other Gods: Adventures In Religious Science Fiction anthology edited by Mayo Mohs, perfect for Scott’s podcast, clockwork Jesus, next readalong?, Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl, “he knows which side his bread is oiled on”, Scott’s having a shootout, “big dying words”, quality of The Marching Morons and C.M. Kornbluth, Hex by Allen Steele, “why is there a hole?”, Allen Steele’s article on whatever.scalzi, what it means to finish

Fantasy And Science Fiction Magazine
Ace Doubles

Posted by Tamahome