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Post by ritt on Feb 11, 2014 22:06:06 GMT -6
What's your favorite Non-Barsoom "Planetary Romance"?
I lately joined an online paperback-trading club, and since I'd read all the ERB Mars books long ago I decided to start checking out the imitators and predecessors...
THE "JANDAR OF CALLISTO" SERIES by Lin Carter: Carter is sorta a hack, but he has a real love of fantasy that shows in his prose and his enthusiasm is somewhat contagious. His best novels are good fun, most are guilty pleasures, and the worst are dumb but harmless. I've read the first four of this series (About a circa-Late 60's Vietnam War helicopter pilot transported to Callisto, moon of Jupiter). Overall they're pretty uneven, but MAD EMPRESS OF CALLISTO was great trashy fun.
THE "GREEN STAR" SERIES by Lin Carter: Read the second of these (When The Green Star Calls). Not great but has a nice "Dreamy" sort of atmosphere to it.
ALMURIC by Robert E. Howard: Strange and deeply flawed but interesting. It's basically "What if John Carter was a complete psychopath?".
THE "KANE OF OLD MARS" SERIES by Michael Moorcock: These were written by a very young Moorcock who had yet to develop his distinct styles and obsessions. Honestly pretty forgettable, but it's interesting that Kane, like Lin Carter's Jandar, is a Vietnam vet.
SWORDSMAN OF MARS by Otis Adelbert Kline: Forgettable, but not as bad as it's usually made out to be. I liked the weird little "Ulfs"... I'm reading this ERB pastiche and then suddenly a bunch of space pixies that would have been at home in Ralph Bakshi's WIZARDS pop in.
GULLIVER OF MARS by Edwin Lester Arnold. Only forty pages into this so far. The prose is lean, brisk and surprisingly modern for 1905.
TRANSIT TO SCORPIO by Alan Bert Akers. First of the 53 (!) volumes of the "Dray Prescot of Antares" series that are supposedly big in Germany but mostly forgotten everywhere else. Haven't read it yet. Honestly I mostly picked it up for the awesome 70's cover art of a freaky vulture-headed humanoid whipping a line of human slaves under a weird mustard sky, a great pulp image.
Any others that anyone would recommend?
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Post by geoffrey on Feb 12, 2014 0:04:44 GMT -6
A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay
Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis
Perelandra by C. S. Lewis
the Flash Gordon comic strips by Alex Raymond
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Post by makofan on Feb 12, 2014 8:47:18 GMT -6
The Scorpio series is awesome fun. The first Gor book was good.
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terje
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Post by terje on Feb 12, 2014 8:49:02 GMT -6
This is one of my favorite genres so I hope you'll forgive my enthusiasm. Favorite: All the Planet Stories by Leigh Brackett where earth men find adventure on Mars, Venus and Skaith. To me this is the best that the planetary romance / sword & planet genre has to offer. Brackett's language and style is enchanting, her worlds exotic and her stories filled with a kind of romantic but noir melancholy. A good place to start is the Fantasy Masterworks volume Sea Kings of Mars and Otherworldly stories. Also worth mentioning: Arnould Galopin's Doctor Omega and Gustave Le Rouge's Vampires of Mars (early french planetary romances about earth men venturing to the red planet, predates both John Carter and Gullivar of Mars) Otis Adelbert Kline - Swordsman of Mars, Outlaws of Mars (pretty much copying Burroughs Barsoom) Van Allen Plexico - Thunder on Mars (combines Barsoom with Thundarr the Barbarian) "Poke" Runyon - Drell Master (fun and original pulp adventure with airships, levitating islands, swashbuckling, weird science and sex magick) Jack Vance - The Planet of Adventures (four short novels about an earth man stranded on an alien world, lots of fascinating alien beings and cultures) Clark Ashton Smith - several planetary adventure stories (The Dweller in the Gulf, The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis, Vulthoom, and the Captain Volmar stories) HG Wells - The First Men in the Moon (perhaps the first planetary adventure, some earth men travel to an alien world by use of a fantastic device and encounter an empire of strange alien beings beneath the dead surface)
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Post by scottenkainen on Feb 12, 2014 8:54:38 GMT -6
If someone were to turn this into a poll, I'd vote for Star Wars (because the question doesn't specify books), First Men in the Moon and Gulliver of Mars, though it feels weird voting on planetary romances and not voting for John Carter...
~Scott "-enkainen" Casper
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Post by Falconer on Feb 13, 2014 18:58:53 GMT -6
Great thread! I like the genre, so maybe this will inspire me to read more.
I have the Sea Kings of Mars collection, and while I like it well enough, there’s a formulaic plot that she reuses in EVERY single story, which gets boring. (Sort of a Han/Leia thing.)
I do like both Lewis books.
I like Star Wars and its sequel; I like Battlestar Galactica TOS, which I think counts as planetary romance as well. (The reimagined series would not, nor would Star Trek in general.) I like the Flash Gordon movie (but I haven’t seen it all the way through). Same with the Buck Rogers TV series.
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Post by stevemitchell on Feb 14, 2014 9:20:47 GMT -6
For Otis Adelbert Kline, I thought his Venus novels were a little more creative and a little more fun than his Mars books.
Warrior of Llarn and Thief of Llarn by Gardner Fox are both pleasant time-wasters.
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Post by ritt on Feb 14, 2014 12:31:34 GMT -6
Just ordered Leigh Brackett's SKAITH trilogy and put SEA-KINGS on a wishlist. Looking forward to these.
I finished GULLIVER OF MARS at work yesterday. It's a fun little book in it's own right, and I'm now about 90% sure that it was ERB's inspiration for PRINCESS... there are just way too many similarities. However while it's very similar to PRINCESS in plot, the tone of the two novels are very different: Barsoom is more violent, erotic, epic, and fantastical, whereas Gulliver' Mars is still an "Adventure" setting, but more lighthearted. Gulliver is heroic and cool, but kind of a blowhard who mainly succeeds due to dumb luck, talking his way out of jams, and strategic cowardliness (For some reason I imagined him in my mind's eye as looking like the actor Owen Wilson). There is a very cool, creepy scene involving a Martian "River of the Dead" (Which Burroughs pretty much just outright stole, although ERB's blue plant-men are better than the stationary killer trees Gulliver encounters). There is a hysterical bit where Gulliver is travelling with a Martian and comes to a great polar wasteland: When his Martian buddy tells him that it's a land so forsaken that no king has ever claimed it Gulliver uses his cutlass to carve "U.S.A." in big letters in the ice. His courtship of the Martian princess Heru is just a lark rather than the great romance of John Carter and Dejah Thoris, and where the book really differs from Burroughs is the ending...
SPOILER:
He unceremoniously dumps Heru and runs off when the big action climax starts to get serious. When the goofball fast-talking hero finally gets into a position where he can't con his way out, he abandons the princess to slavery and/or death and bails. It's a kind of shocking ending ever today, let alone in 1905.
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Post by ritt on Feb 14, 2014 12:49:15 GMT -6
The first Gor book was good. The Gor Saga is a weirdly fascinating cultural phenomena for many reasons (How many "Good" writers spawn an entire subculture of people actually copying their lifestyle -or at least their sex life- from their fiction?) but one of the odder bits is that the first six books or so (IIRC) are actually pretty conventional Sword & Planet novels.
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Post by Finarvyn on Feb 14, 2014 14:53:22 GMT -6
The first Gor book was good. The Gor Saga is a weirdly fascinating cultural phenomena for many reasons (How many "Good" writers spawn an entire subculture of people actually copying their lifestyle -or at least their sex life- from their fiction?) but one of the odder bits is that the first six books or so (IIRC) are actually pretty conventional Sword & Planet novels. But strangely enough, Makofan is correct nonetheless. The first couple of Gor books are excellent examples of Sword & Planet books, if one can ignore the way Norman treats gender slavery. You've got a nifty little storyline with the Priest-Kings, and later with the Kurii. I wish "they" would publish a sanitized version of the books for the general public. They would be much better received without all of the gender baggage. The other thing to note is that I was reading somewhere that many (most?) of the people who participate in this unusual lifestyle have never read or maybe never heard of the books. For better or worse, I'm not sure that the Gor books have actually influenced that many people.
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Post by ritt on Feb 14, 2014 15:28:24 GMT -6
I read the first twenty-five (!) Gor books back in college. My memory is (And it was a while ago) that the first three or so were very traditional S&P (Slavery was just a background detail), the next few were S&W but with a lot of bondage in a "Damsel in Distress/Romans & Slavegirls" sort of vein that wasn't too odd for a pulp adventure, and then they turned into what most people think of when they hear "Gor".
Anyway, next up on my big Planetary Romance binge is some more Lin Carter (By The Light of The Green Star and possibly Mind Wizards of Callisto)) and then maybe Leigh Brackett.
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Post by geoffrey on Feb 16, 2014 22:14:16 GMT -6
Here is a pretty good piece of art inspired by Lewis's Perelandra:
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jdjarvis
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Post by jdjarvis on Feb 21, 2014 19:11:40 GMT -6
Off of Barsoom my favorite planetary romances would be the planet Krishna stories by de Camp even if they are a bit more straight sci-fi.
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Post by ritt on Mar 7, 2014 16:58:08 GMT -6
Favorite: All the Planet Stories by Leigh Brackett where earth men find adventure on Mars, Venus and Skaith. To me this is the best that the planetary romance / sword & planet genre has to offer. Brackett's language and style is enchanting, her worlds exotic and her stories filled with a kind of romantic but noir melancholy. A good place to start is the Fantasy Masterworks volume Sea Kings of Mars and Otherworldly stories. ) I just finished the first Skaith novel. HOLY CRAP this is great! Eric John Stark is like Han Solo as written by Robert E. Howard and Skaith is like a mix of Afghanistan and Barsoom with a dash of Early 70's Southern California (Dopey cults and hedonistic Dyonisian youth movements). Brackett's prose is so economical it almost makes Burroughs look long-winded. GOOD STUFF.
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Post by ritt on Mar 23, 2014 21:18:19 GMT -6
...And now I just finished the second Skaith novel, THE HOUNDS OF SKAITH. Great stuff! Imagine a big STAR TREK-style high-tech galactic union, then imagine what that civilization's equivalent of Afghanistan or Somalia might be like: Kirk adventures in the galactic "G-8", while Eric John Stark fights with fists and swords in the "Third World" of Skaith, where the promise of the stars is very far away and brutality and death are always close. Plus the titular Hounds of Skaith are awesome "Monsters" and are very rip-off-able for gaming.
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Post by Achán hiNidráne on May 14, 2014 16:44:44 GMT -6
Ignoring its increasingly weird sequels and poorly written prequels, DUNE, with it's de-emphasis on technology, fuedalistic politics, and scenes of blade combat, could be called a "planetary romance."
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Post by cadriel on May 14, 2014 18:26:57 GMT -6
Ignoring its increasingly weird sequels and poorly written prequels, DUNE, with it's de-emphasis on technology, fuedalistic politics, and scenes of blade combat, could be called a "planetary romance." Yes, very much so. Dune is a planetary romance – but it subverts the usual heroic fiction tropes in favor of a focus on ecology and politics. (It's also my favorite novel, bar none.) Messiah and Children are generally worthwhile in themselves. The other Frank Herbert novels are strictly for Dune fanatics, and everything released by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson is not fit for human consumption.
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Post by ritt on Jul 9, 2014 21:26:14 GMT -6
The Scorpio series is awesome fun. Finished the first one. Really liked the Master and Commander background of the hero, and the recurring Scorpio/scorpion motif. It looks like the later books get really gonzo (Not that I'm complaining...). In volume 33 (!) the planet Kregan gets invaded by a plague of werewolves!
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tog
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Post by tog on Jul 9, 2014 22:01:28 GMT -6
The Scorpio series is awesome fun. Finished the first one. Really liked the Master and Commander background of the hero, and the recurring Scorpio/scorpion motif. It looks like the later books get really gonzo (Not that I'm complaining...). In volume 33 (!) the planet Kregan gets invaded by a plague of werewolves! I read Transit To Scorpio and wasn't really impressed; maybe I should stick with it. Some Judges Guild stuff seems to have been influenced by Prescott - there are write-ups of a couple Kregan beasts in the Dungeoneer Journal #25, and a bunch of listings in the Field Guide To Encounters (as well as loads of references to Lin Carter's "World's End" series, a big hunk of fun cheese in itself!).
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Post by ritt on Jul 10, 2014 10:32:01 GMT -6
I read Transit To Scorpio and wasn't really impressed; maybe I should stick with it. The middle of the novel was an awful slog -the author seemed to be a lot more enthusiastic about the scenes set in Nelson's navy on early 1800s Earth than the stuff on the planet Kregan. That said, it was odd enough that I will give future volumes a try.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 11, 2014 5:46:38 GMT -6
Ignoring its increasingly weird sequels and poorly written prequels, DUNE, with it's de-emphasis on technology, fuedalistic politics, and scenes of blade combat, could be called a "planetary romance." Yes, very much so. Dune is a planetary romance – but it subverts the usual heroic fiction tropes in favor of a focus on ecology and politics. (It's also my favorite novel, bar none.) Messiah and Children are generally worthwhile in themselves. The other Frank Herbert novels are strictly for Dune fanatics, and everything released by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson is not fit for human consumption. Yeah, I think that DUNE should qualify. My take on the books is a lot like yours. The first one was great, the later ones so-so, the books put out by Herbert's son not that good.
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Post by strangebrew on Jul 11, 2014 7:11:45 GMT -6
Not to hijack the thread, but I'm reading Dune for the first time. I like it so far, but the comments here give me the impression that the sequels are less and less interesting. I don't have a ton of time for reading, so is it worth it continuing the series after the first book, or move on to something else?
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Post by Deleted on Jul 18, 2014 9:12:33 GMT -6
IMO, absolutely yes! - The first three books are definitely something; later than that, the series lost much of its original appeal to me, though, because the philosophical aspect stood back behind, well, intergalactic soap opera. It's interesting to see, though, how Herbert, from what I understand, a concept writer, increasingly falls in love with his characters. That cheapens the points of his narration, but is sweet to read about.
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Post by Old Guard Villian on Jul 13, 2015 17:15:22 GMT -6
John Norman's Gor and ERB's JCWM is still a better romance than 50 shades of grey & twilight....put together.
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Post by Punkrabbitt on Jul 17, 2015 15:06:23 GMT -6
"Tschai: Planet Of Adventure" is probably my favorite non-ERB S&P series. I am also a really big fan of Flash Gordon, except for the abysmal 1950s and 2000s TV series. Even the two cartoon series were decent.
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