Andrew J. OffuttRezensionen

Andrew Offutt wonderfully pieced together an extremely well written and mentally visual story. His descriptions vividly painted scenes into my mind and made reading this story very enjoyable.

I did not like this book. I guess it was supposed to be a satire of Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars books using a gritty realism take to get the satire across. It did not work. The style in which the book is written is irritating, the first-person narration by the motor-mouthed protagonist just annoyed me nonstop. The constant references to the Mars books made me want to read something more akin to those even though they rely on "false chivalry" as this book put it. The very long and detailed rape scene near the end of the first third of the book was a big negative but I read on.
Most of the book consists of long empty conversations that take a page and a half to say something that could have been communicated in a single sentence. There are a couple of fight scenes, not very exciting or even that impactful though it seems the author tried to make them shocking and bloody. It seemed to me that a large portion of the story uses descriptions of the bureaucracy of the city as world-building. I can see the satire in this as opposed to Sword & Planet tales but it was not executed at all very well. All it did was make me want to go read an actual Sword & Planet story.

This trilogy is great. I think REH would have enjoyed the story immensely. It has an epic touch while not getting bogged down. A Conan story where we get to see his melancholy demeanor coupled with his intensity.

I know purists look down upon the non-Howard stories but I found this to be a quick and enjoyable read. The illustrations were a treat.

A slow moving but satisfying novel about the Thieves’ World character Hanse, also known as Shadowspawn, as he leaves Sanctuary behind.
The first section is scene setting, reminding readers of the adventures of Shadowspawn in the Thieves’ World anthologies which have brought him to his current position, trekking across the desert with bags of silver, and with Mignureal, his girlfriend.
Although slow moving the passage through the forest and settling in the city of Firaqa are nicely done and reasonably in-depth explorations of new locations, which is rarely done in fantasy fiction. It is only a pity that this is narrated largely from Hanse’s viewpoint and not more from Mignureal’s.
The final section, the main “action” of the story is marred at the outset by Hanse being uncharacteristically open about his previous career as a thief, whereas he had been very cautious previously. Although necessary for the story, this was impatient storytelling and disappointingly heavy handed after the care taken to create the setting of Firaqa.
There is unfinished business at the end, so I will have to find out whether this was followed through in later Thieves’ World stories.

The conversion to Kindle is adequate, although the repeated substitution of an “m” instead of “rn” is annoying, as it could easily have been corrected following proof reading.½

***SPOILERS AHEAD***
A wild ride...
This book is about the dastardly plan to kill the emperor of the seven worlds and place the blame on the barbarian king Lord Valeron of Branarius. As the back cover describes "Villainy most foul."
Okay so right off, this book obviously takes place in a spin-off world of Robert E. Howard's Conan universe. That was in the beginning...
However as you read you find very peculiar things are going on in this universe. In the time and place of the story apparently we (now) are the ancient race that had perished long before their time. When they talk of the Kings arriving on ships I was thinking like Viking long ships. NO! Not at all. They meant SPACEships!!!! And as hard as the author tried to explain how it is that they come to use these spaceships, his explanation seemed to falter a bit as it came up short for the reader that these people are able to maneuver these ships but not know how they are doing it. They just press buttons. Have you ever seen the movie Krull? It's a lot like that. Ah, but I digress.
The story was pretty typical of a barbarian epic fantasy, which is a point that I definitely loved. The beginning sucked me right in but I have to say that the ending was a little less than satisfactory. And while the fighting scenes were very well described, some other scenes, such as the romantic exchanges, were lacking very much in detail. Some just cut clean to the chase without any detail at all.
As surprising as it was, this still was a very fun read for me and I would be happy to recommend it to those who enjoy epic fantasies and adventure stories.

New heroic fiction. Mostly new authors.

The Black Sorcerer of the Black Castle by Andrew J. Offutt
S.E. rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Black Sorcerer of the Black Castle is Andrew J. Offutt's parody of Sword & Sorcery. The one I read has illustrations from Jim Pitts, introduction by Wayne Warfield (editor), and an afterword by andrew j. offutt (who seldom capitalized his name).

It is intentionally overwritten with excess adjectives, and offutt referred to this as "BS" (short for many things, Black Sorcerer included.) The story has the common tropes of a lone hero fighting ~3 representations of something evil capped with a final confrontation with a malicious wizard. Plenty of silly call-outs to the S&S crowd are within (i.e., the wizard is named Reh after Robert E Howard).

I heard about this via the Sword & Sorcery group on Goodreads. My goal was further to understand how the use of color was applied in pulp fiction (S&S especially).

The afterword reveals the story's evolution. More importantly, it showed how multiple readers/editors preferred a particular balance of humor and action. In fact, offutt confessed he learned via working with BS of his Great Discovery:
"pornography and heroic fantasy have something much in common: both quite for different reasons, need to create a mood and a spell, and to make it last --and neither, can be overwritten.

I am not sure anyone can be more surprised than I, but I have to judge this novel from 1973 the best Sword&Sorcery novel I have read.

I have set out to read the genre after a lag of many decades. I had immersed myself in high fantasy, and science fiction, and Literature, too — must keep that capitalized, you know — in my first decade or so of reading. Somehow I had skipped S&S, for the most part. Oh, I had read Vance, and tried Fritz Leiber (the Fafhrd/Grey Mouser stories being the only things of his I cared for), and done some basic duty with ERB. But Lin Carter was merely an enthusiast-cum-critic for me, Robert E. Howard a famous suicide, and de Camp the author of one terrific humorous poem, also from 1973, “The Ameba.”

But I have professional reasons to dip into the genre now. And I have, in this cause, finally read a few Carter adventures, Poul Anderson ventures, and taken a refresher course in ERB. It has all been very instructive.

I confess, however: this is the first of the S&S fictions to garner from me a highly positive appraisal.

I hadn’t read Offut before, not even, I think, in short form. And his reputation as a “pornographer” was . . . intriguing. I mean, as a Jack Woodford fan and James Branch Cabell devotee, I could hardly let rumor dissuade me.

I am glad I did not. This is an extremely clever book. It is meta-Sword&Sorcery. Sf/parodic, sure, but well written and the adventure is neither distracting nor poorly integrated into the story. It has twists. It is a twist — and with that in mind, perhaps that very word, “twist,” we can find justification for the serpentine cover illustration by (apparently? obviously?) Frank Frazetta.

Oh, and the fact that Frazetta is name-dropped early in the book.

And, as in Woodford and Cabell, not even the occasional frank sex talk, and a description of rape, strikes me as in the least bit pornographic.

It is all very "meta." I understand why most readers might not appreciate this. I did.

Offutt's dedication for King Dragon claims for its predecessors the Lost World novels of Haggard, Doyle, Burroughs, Wells, and Howard. His world is "lost" by being remote in space, and he has populated it with a jungle and megafauna from a variety of prehistoric and prehuman ages of earth. Besides anachronistic animals, there are a lot of fanciful plants. It is all the result of long-ago terraforming and breeding by an eccentric tycoon who came to see himself as God. The religious background of Offut's interstellar future is Muslim, which makes for a little different flavor than most science fiction written circa 1980.

The male protagonist Jimajin Allayth is an aspiring scholar who has journeyed from Earth to explore this isolated and mysterious world. In parallel with his arrival, there is the story of Joharah, a savage inhabitant of the world who becomes an outcast from her tribe. Eventually, the two meet as captives. Once the full narrative frame is in view, with Jim and Jo together fighting against the pterodactyl forces of the backwater world's senile demiurge, the plot wraps up with blinding speed. Death Star explodes, everyone calls it a day.

The book is shorter than it looks, with many pages occupied by black-and-white art from Estaban Moroto, who draws an excellent mostly-naked sword-and-planet babe in the Frazetta tradition, as well as suitably scary dinosaurs. Unfortunately, not all of the illustrations are unique; many of them are merely different enlarged details of the same original drawings. The cover art of a chained Joharah contorting below a descending dragon is by Rowena Morrill, and is actually a little more lurid than the book deserves. The pictured scene does not occur in the text.

Here's a short, odd attempt at erotic science fiction from 1975. The protagonist is a successful high-status pimp in the severely libertarian "Freewill" global society of an indeterminate future. Humanity has populated Mars and some other worlds of the inner Solar System. Procreative partnerships are disparaged, and women who bear children are consigned to "mate slavery," while children are raised in large communitarian creches insulated from interaction with adults. Most of the sexual episodes actually detailed in the book are interracial. There is a tolerant regard for homosexuality, although one passage involves a man's rape of a lesbian, strangely "justified" by paranormal circumstances and "all's well that ends well."

Throughout the book, key characters have telepathic conversations and psychic premonitions and recollections amounting to full hallucinations. These are at first associated with artifacts called "star gems," but later revealed to be a function of the human "genetic continuum" established by the original fostering of humanity by a survivor of the destroyed fifth planet. All of this is explained with only brief bursts of exposition in the context of a high-action plot involving threatened invasion by tentacular monstrosities from an alien dimension.

The whole book highlights a distinctively 1970s inflection of the neophilically-imagined future and could never be written today. It's really not an admirable piece of literature, but it is sometimes amusing, and certainly distinctive.

Quite entertaining.

This free-standing sword-and-planet novel is fun enough, although its greatest virtue may have been to provoke its Boris Vallejo cover art. The far future historical frame has no conscious relationship to ancestral earth, and the interplanetary civilization that forms the setting is just surfacing from a medieval dark age. There is a post-apocalyptic theme of the rediscovery of ancient technologies. The barbarian of the title is a newly-crowned warlord of one of the "Six Worlds," and the tale concerns imperial intrigue touched off by the prospect of his possible betrothal to the daughter of the Emperor.

Although the setting and action are very much in line with Edgar Rice Burroughs, the running commentary on "barbarism" makes for a more interesting comparison to Robert E. Howard. Both emphasize the heroic virtues of men who succeed in conditions of barbarism. Offutt's protagonist Valeron is rather embarrassed to be considered a barbarian, which Howard's Conan never was. (Conan would simply take advantage of the way in which it would cause civilized folks to underestimate him.)

There are some consistent verbal affectations: "it seemed not deep," "Maybe Darcus could have done defeat on the Sungoli," etc. But the prose is fast-paced nevertheless, as is the sequence of events. The end of the story is abundantly foreshadowed, but not hopelessly predictable.

No one can write Conan like Robert E. Howard can, but Mr Offutt does a pretty good job with his contribution towards "filling in the gaps" of the Conan saga.

First read this when I was about 12 or 13. Returned to is a second time when in my early twenties and a third time in my late thirties.

I first read this one as a teenager, encountering it as number 3 in the Bantam Conan pastiche novel series. It features a 17-year-old Conan (a while after the events in Robert E. Howard's "The Tower of the Elephant") who nevertheless has a very complicated immediate backstory, evidently a product of the two previous novels in a Conan trilogy written by Offutt in the 1970s. (The earlier volumes were not published in the Bantam series, though, and I have not read them.) Although the titular Sword of Skelos is rivaled in importance by the Eye of Erlik in this story, the Eye was common to all three Offutt books. The setting is in the desert kingdoms between Stygia and Tauran, with the cities of Arenjun and Zamboula as foci.

The narrative voice varies throughout, although always in an omniscient third person. Some chapters begin with raw description and presume no prior exposition; they might stand on their own as short stories. Others are clearly oriented toward the larger structure of the novel and/or trilogy, and pick up with a presumed reader knowledge of prior developments. Characterizations are fairly vivid, and the pace of the action is fast. Conan does a lot of killing.

Not even in the somewhat skeevy Robert Jordan Conan novels does Conan feature as a rapist. Yet in this book, while Conan insists that he is not a rapist, his competitor thief and eventual ally Isparana contradicts him, but when he insists that his assault of her "was not rape," she then looks "away in silent admission of the truth" (137). Still, the incident in question is quite clearly rape as described: an act of sexual violence with its non-consensuality demonstrated by the fact that Isparana had just tried to murder Conan (84-5). The narration also refers to their assailants in the desert as "would-be rapists" (98), as contrasted with the accomplished rapist who is the story's hero, I suppose. And all of this business is sandwiched in with passages emphasizing Conan's personal honor.

Actually, I would not be surprised to find out that Jordan's Conan stories had been consciously modeled on those of Offutt. There are both cosmetic and structural similarities, and in narrative chronology Jordan picks up (with the youngest Conan of his novels, in Conan the Magnificent) immediately after the finale of The Sword of Skelos. So perhaps I should set Offutt at the headspring of the latter-day Conan style perpetrated by Robert Jordan and Roland Green. Offutt's book does not suffer from the abrupt endings common to Jordan's later efforts, though.

As with the other books in this Bantam series, there are interior line art and a wonderful map by Tim Kirk.

If you haven't yet read other Thieves' World novels, and most importantly, if you haven't read Shadowspawn, please go read those first. Please, at least read Shadownspawn. Then sit back, and feel contentment, when you read the end of this one.

Ah, Shadowspawn. Why didn't you tell me that Andy Offutt was gone?

So it goes.

From the very first time Shadowspawn stepped out from the shadows, in the very first novel, I've been spellbound. This novel is one of my favorites, of all the offshoots of Thieves' World, Make no mistake, if you start reading this one, you'll have to read more. Fair warning. The story doesn't end on page 278.

Then again, like real life, the story just continues on, you know?

Standard 1970s fare with over-crowding, pollution and violence. Not much here to like except the setting in Louisville, which was unusual.

Andrew Offutt seems to think that Edgar Rice Burroughs was a prude. For myself, I'm pretty confident that ERB consciously devised the myriads of implied sexual scenarios in his John Carter and Tarzan stories alike. He's the one who insisted that everyone on Mars be naked after all. In any case, come 1973, Offutt is ready to shuck the chivalric approach and let the barbarians barbarize.

Rather than simply telling his own more explicit riff on Barsoom and its savage excitements (as John Norman did in his Gor stories at roughly five times the total length of Burroughs' original series) Offutt tells us about telling it, in the chattily sardonic voice of his grad student protagonist. Hank Ardor -- oh, yes, the title is a pun -- has read Burroughs and does not fail to compare and contrast his adventures with those of John Carter each step of the way. Readers well-versed in the planetary romance sub-genre will find plenty of amusing allusions throughout.

One of the too-clever-by-half touches Offutt adds is to subject his protagonist to situs inversus as a function of his transport to Aros: he is anatomically reversed, left-to-right. My recent reading in Bateson's Mind and Nature highlights a problem with this detail, though: How would he know? As it happens, "left" and "right" are only definable relative to circumstance, and if his entire circumstance (including his physical body) has been changed, there would be no way of detecting the reversal. If he picked up a normal English book, it might seem printed backwards -- but he has no such cues for his orientation.

The title of the final chapter is "The answer that was true -- but STILL didn't satisfy," and while I'm not convinced of the "true" part (even within the hypothetical construct of the fiction), a little dissatisfaction seems to be a central theme of this book, which is a pretty quick piece of light entertainment, and one of the less profound items of metafiction you're likely to encounter.

P.S. This book (the Dell paperback and I think only edition) has what must be the ugliest, most irrelevant cover ever painted by Frank Frazetta!

Grimly fascinating, if overly didactic, tale of spiralling, ever-worsening, out-of-control world violence, with the most of the detailed action taking place within the USA.

Good folks, in both the country and the cities, are forced to fort up in their houses and apartment buildings for self-protection against roving gangs of amoral, sadistic, thieving, scumbag 'rippers'. Sound familiar?

Over-population is seen as the main underlying cause of this escalating social disintegration.

Main Settings:
1) in Haldeman, Rowan County, Kentucky near the county seat of Morehead, in the western foothill outskirts of the Appalachians, near the junction of Federal Highway 60 and State Highway 174;
2) in one of the bigger American cities - NYC or Chicago.½

Good stuff, stronger than the first novel.½

Ouffutt's writing got better as the series continued.½

Not for Minors