Some years ago, I bought The Great Book of Amber at a used bookstore. The Amber books were one of those books I remember seeing on shelves in used bookstores when browsing for sci fi and fantasy as a kid, but were not ones that I read at the time.

These collection actually contains ten books and I only read the first five, but that first five contains the initial, extended story line of how Corwin saved Amber and possibly the entire known universe from… well, let’s just it’s a complicated plot.

The setting is interesting: the ‘real’ world is Amber and what we know as ‘Earth’ is one of many (limitless?) ‘shadows’ of Amber, some of which were created by the disappeared king of Amber and his many children. There is also the ‘Courts of Chaos,’ which is very poorly described and explained and winds up sounding very much like something from Michael Moorcock (Moorcock and Zelazny were both part of a new wave of British fantasy).

The hero, Corwin, embarks on a swashbuckling journey quest, which is thrilling, but, as you can probably guess, not as engrossing to me as it might have been. There are those who swear by these books. For me, I was totally gripped at the noirish mystery with which opened, with an amnesiac Corwin waking up in a mental hospital on ‘Earth’ and trying to figure out what the heck is going on, but once he learned, it became less interesting to me.

Nonetheless, better writing than most and not sorry I read it.

I came across that term in an interview with the sound artist, Allen Mozek, and I instantly knew what he meant.

As a child, I remember that my mother would take me into this one, huge (it seemed to me) store. I think that it was a grocery store, but it might also have been something like a Target (though probably not a Target; maybe a Montgomery Ward). In that store was an enormous (again, it seemed so to me as a child) row of books and magazines. I loved best these hardback books that were mostly science fiction illustrations, like cover art for books and magazines. But that also had paperback fantasy and science fiction.

Recently, we visited my family in rural Arkansas. There was an old fashioned drug store that used to have a wire rack filled with cheap paperbacks.

Also, I can remember when supermarkets used to have books. I know that many still do, but back in the day, they were both cheaper and more varied.

I loved those supermarket fantasies. I wanted them all. I would read the backs of each one and pore over the covers with awe. Mozek is a little dismissive of them, but I am still engaged in an archaeology of those memories (hence, my love of Ace Doubles).

I was in Chicago a few months ago and used a few free minutes to walk from my hotel to the nearest, open bookstore (I forget the name). Whenever I’m in a new city, I like to visit a local, non-chain bookstore and buy a book. It’s just a thing I do.

While browing an old fashioned metal wire turn rack (like they used to have on drugstores, stocked with things like Doc Savage novels and Harlequin romances), I saw Aldair, Master of Ships. It looked cool, so I bought it, but later realized it was a second book in a series.

So, here we are, reading the first book, Aldair in Albion.

It’s nothing groundbreaking, but does offer a nice, new twist.

The world is similar to late Republic/early Imperial Rome, with various people’s given names similar to things like Gaulish tribe (the Venicii) and the Vikings (Vikonen), but all filtered through a Robert E. Howard-esque, Hyperborean sensibility. But while not state outright, the author quickly lets us know that the characters are not human. They aren’t properly described, because the third person limited perspective of Aldair, via the narrative, already knows what people look like. But words like ‘pelt’ and ‘snout’ are dropped, as well as the fact that Aldair’s girlfriend, as it were, has more than the usual (for a human) number of nipples.

A reader of very basic knowledge will peg this as a post-apocalyptic novel, where animals have evolved and become dominant and the titular Albion is clearly England.

But, after 200 pages of standard, but generally exciting fantasy adventure, we get an interesting twist in the final five pages. No sign of a nuclear explosion, but rather, humans apparently genetically engineered the various humanoid peoples from animals (Aldair is descended from cows), dropped them in sci-fi style sleeper pods that opened all over the world. No word of where humans are, but the whole thing looks more like an experiment and Aldair commits himself to helping the genetically modified peoples of the world build their future, having been disgusted by humans.