I’ll admit, I’ve been reading free copies of these novels on my Nook, but I think that Chessmen of Mars is the last of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars (or Barsoom) novels that’s in the public domain and while I’m sure it’s possible to find a free copy anyway, it’s a moral point no to, though that seems shallow, since I took advantage to read the others for free, isn’t it? But let’s not make the perfect be the enemy of the good, now shall we?

Like many of his novels set on the dying planet of Barsoom (known to us, as Mars), Chessmen feels like two long, connected short stories. The daughter of John Carter and Dejah Thoris runs away and her airship crashes among yet another previously unknown subset of Martians, the kaldane and their rykor… well, it’s complicated. The kaldane are oversized human heads that walk on little  spiders and who mount themselves on headless human bodies called rykor, seize hold of the spinal column, and use them as their bodies. Burroughs doesn’t have Lovecraft nor Carter’s feel for imparting the horror felt by a character, but he does a decent job of showing how horrified the princess is (and her lovesick rescuer who is, naturally, also a fierce and chivalrous warrior).

When the two more or less human protagonists escape (along with their new friend, one of the walking heads and his stolen rykor), they wind up in a sort of lost and primitive kingdom where a game similar to chess is played, only with… well, you can guess. Yes, the pieces are actually people, fighting on a giant board.

Will Tara of Heliun and Gahan of Gathol escape? Will they find true love together? Will the villainous king (or jeddak) be replaced by his much nicer and braver vassal? Will there be an addendum explaining the (non-fatal) rules of Martian chess?

Well, um, yeah.

Maybe not as good as the first book in the trilogy, but still very good. The world building is nicely realized and it’s both good and important that it’s a book with a female protagonist that was written by a female author. It shouldn’t be, but I hope we can all agree that full gender equality hasn’t been reached yet, so anything that breaks up the boys club is positive.

The other week, I was visiting my new grandniece (yes, I’m old; I can already feel the icy hand of death clutching at my still, but barely beating heart; I can only pray that when the reaper comes for me, he finds wearing nothing but a pair of ruby encrusted spurs and listening to Jefferson Airplane’s classic album, Surrealistic Pillow), and my nephew-in-law showed me one of the books the infant had been given. It was an ABCs of famous American women and ‘U’ was for Ursula K. Le Guin. I explained that she was a famous and great feminist writer, best (though not exclusively) known for writing very thoughtful fantasy and science fiction.

That has nothing to do with The Invasion of the Tearling, but feminism in the genre had been on mind and that’s why.

We are in a fantasy world, with an invasion and a young queen, but the most interesting part are visions/flashbacks to how people from ‘our’ world wound up in this fantasy landscape. There’s a messianic revolutionary named William Tear and a world of corporate control created by a former president – a far right ideologue. It’s tempting to read Donald Trump into him, but he’s actually more of a Reagan-era figure. More Christian right than meandering, narcissistic fascism. The revolutionary movement grew out of the Occupy movement and it does feel real enough, but the Calvinistic, ‘chosen ones’ nature of the people who will escape to the new world (better world, they call it) is disquieting. There’s a single mention that they are not actually moving in place, but in time (to the future? the past?).

Our heroine fends off the evil queen (actually, she gets a three year truce), but quite clearly releases some more horrible evil into the world, so there’s that. I’ll check the library to see if they have the third book available.

This is actually a trilogy, but when I was younger, I read the first book, but a good bit of it, I didn’t quite follow, though the opening stuck with me. Then, my mother sent me up a box of my books from her home and, among them, was an aging paperback copy of the first book, which I re-read while visiting a good friend in Chicago.

As it turns out, the only way to really read it now is to buy a reprint in an omnibus volume. Of course, I’m writing this because I’ve finally finished said volume.

McKillip is lovely, delicate writer, with a soft touch that is similar to Ursula K. LeGuin. I don’t think it would surprise any reader of Riddle-Master that it feels very similar in tone to the Earthsea novels (including being more than a little feminist, even though the hero of Riddle-Master is male – though so was the protagonist of two of three original Earthsea novels).

The story, which gets too complicated to really summarize here, struggles after the first book. Things don’t feel properly explained and everything rushes towards to a conclusion that, while not exactly deus ex machina, does not feel properly earned.

The coolest idea, undoubtedly, are the importance of riddles to the culture of the world. When the story begins, magic is gone – or, at least, wizards are gone. But a connection to that former world is maintained through the study of ancient lore. These ‘riddles’ are almost never actually riddles, but more like trivia from antiquity. The theme of these riddles as being vital secrets for understanding one’s self, one’s world, and one’s predicament is consistent throughout and I never ceased to find the concept rewarding.

What I most took away is a desire to re-read another one of her books, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. I think I was living in Florida when I read it. I remember being in my mother’s car and reading it after she had bought it for me at a used bookstore.

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.