Sunday, September 16, 2007

The Return of Pulp Sword & Sorcery

From Paizo Blog

For me, tabletop RPG publishers have been a boon for fiction not just because of the gaming material they churn out but due to their fiction as well. The most obvious is the giant TSR which was succeeded by Wizards of the Coast. Where would be our Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance without them? (That's not to include many of the fantasies that have been inspired by Dungeons & Dragons such as Raymond E. Feist's Magician.) However, what really got me excited was when White Wolf reprinted previously unavailable (in the US) classics of fantasy such as Michael Moorcock's Eternal Guardian series or Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar.

Unfortunately, as much as a lot of tabletop gamers are SF&F fans, not all SF&F fans are gamers and so finds like those aren't always evident. Anyway, one of the more not-so-recent announcements is that Paizo Publishing is printing some Sword & Sorcery-style fiction under its Planet Stories label. We have the likes of Gary Gygax (D&D's creator), Michael "Multiverse" Moorcock, C.L. Moore (one of the earliest female Sword & Sorcery writers), and Robert E. Howard, among others.

Anyway, Black Gate has an interview with the publisher, Erik Mona. Here's an excerpt:
Some of the books in the Planet Stories line will surprise you. Late next year we plan to release a monster of a book called The Walrus and the Warwolf, by a writer from New Zealand named Hugh Cook. It's a sprawling, baroque fantasy filled with pirates, swordplay, magic, and world-building that approaches Vance in its elegance. It's the fourth in a ten-part non-linear series called The Chronicles of an Age of Darkness that only made it a handful of badly-cut books in America in the late ’80s. I loved the books then and tracked them down on family trips to the UK, finally assembling a complete set I've since read three times. Over here the first books were published as Wizard War, The Questing Hero, The Hero Returns, The Oracle, and Lords of the Sword. I'd love to be able to publish more installments of that great series, and strong sales of The Walrus and the Warwolf will virtually guarantee that happening.

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