While in Oregon recently I had the opportunity to pick up some 70's era pulp pastiche by Lin Carter. I bought four Jandar of Callisto books as well as four World's End books. We'll stick with the end of the world for now.
As I said, I bought four books in Lin Carter's World's End series and those are all that I have read. Ten, or maybe even eleven, books were planned by the author before falling popularity put an end to his grand designs. Only six books ended up getting published and they are all out of print. Check out the titles: The Warrior of World's End, The Enchantress of World's End, The Immortal of World's End, The Barbarian of World's End, etc.
What I was looking for was some outrageous sword and sorcery styled pulp novels -- the kind of fantasy that was published before everyone decided that fantasy wasn't fantasy unless it was a Tolkien knock-off. After reading the first paragraph of the first novel, I thought I had hit pay dirt. I mean, check this out:
"At the western end of the Crystal Mountains there flourished in former ages the city of Ardelix. Once it had been a great center of a race called [the] Hybrids of Phex, but at the end of the period of which I write it had long been abandoned to ruin by the Phexians, who were themselves extinct, having succumbed to the Laughing Plague half an eon earlier."
It's these kind of descriptions that provide what delight these books have to offer. The book is set 700,000,000 years in the future on Earth's last great super-continent Gondwane. Most of the world has succumbed to barbarism. The moon is slowly falling and is much larger in the night sky. The sun is dying and burns with a dimmer golden light. You have floating islands, vast plains of purple grass, flying castles, giant tiger men, androids with silver hair, mechanical birds, and -- my favorite -- an entire mountain range thousands of feet high carved into cyclopean statues by a race of beings so obsessed with their morality that they felt the need to build a monument that would last until after the Sun burned out.
Alas, the characters are wafer thin, the plot is all camp, and anytime our band of heroes gets into an impossible jam, some deus ex machina device pulls them from the jaws of defeat before they can break a sweat. They pale in comparison to "classic" pulp fiction which at least managed to maintain a pulse pounding thread of action and adventure throughout the narrative. There's nothing to these books but the scenery, but at times that's enough to make them worthwhile.
3 comments:
To me, I find the "millions of years from now, people are still around and still stuck on earth or at least in the solar system" to be an interesting notion for sci-fi. I've thought about settings of my own in this general field. Overall, it seems less common than many other kinds of sci-fi, although it exists, as in the example here. The monster term "Grue", most famous from Zork, also comes from a far-future-earth book, not that I've read it or anything.
I've never heard of a Grue.
I too really like the idea of people still stuck on the Earth millions of years from now. But I've not yet seen a book that does it in a way that I like.
I've not played Zork for more than a few minutes ever, but I know well the line: "You are likely to be eaten by a grue."
Anyway, my own far future earth context is one with pervasive levels of distant past and ongoing nanotech and AI, with people at near immortal lifespans and faded memories of the past. It would be somewhat brave-new-worldy but not so crass in how I'd tell the story. I was also imagining some Worthing-Chronicle-like turns of events of what happens when you have an overpopulated environment sustained by external forces (chicken farm?) for its own ends and then you "liberate" them and the sustainable population level suddenly drops? Could get ugly. Anyway, I won't likely write any of my stories anyway, and I don't have them fully fleshed out.
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