Taking Back Escapism

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Well, here we are—the final installment in Michael Moorcock's Kane of Old Mars trilogy. In City of the Beast, Moorcock first introduced us to the steely-eyed physicist and swordsman Michael Kane, a man catapulted across space and time by a chance invention, who hit the ground running and managed to make himself a prince of the violent, vibrant world that is ancient Mars. Moorcock himself has said that, in the early days of his career, he would sometimes only give himself a few days to write a book, and in that seminal Michael Kane tale, we felt that breathless pace—the prose light and quick, the images coming in fast succession as Kane fought blue giants, cities of thieves, and vast subterranean monsters. In its sequel, Lord of the Spiders, Michael Kane—yanked cruelly back to Earth by his fellow scientists—manages to return to his adopted world, only to find himself in a place (and perhaps time!) far removed from his beloved green city of Varnal and the gorgeous princess waiting there. With Lord of the Spiders, Moorcock keeps the same breakneck pace, but the story as a whole feels darker, as Kane's adventures become colored by his despair and deal with darker subject matter—genocide, revolution, and assassination.

In Masters of the Pit, Moorcock returns a final time to the familiar characters of Mars, who by this point feel like old friends—Hool Haji the blue giant, steadfast Princess Shizala, and of course Michael Kane. Yet rather than rehashing either of the book's predecessors, Moorcock takes the story in yet another new direction, this time with a more philosophical bent. While much of the story deals with Kane and Hool Haji traveling (and frequently battling their way) across the world in search of a cure for a deadly plague, the focus of the story seems to be not on the violent struggle, but on the moral one. By far the stars of the show in my mind are the citizens of Cend-Amrid, who in their attempt to survive through machine-like efficiency have succeeded in killing everything that made them human. Adding to the theme are the dog-men of Hahg, degenerate mutants that continue to cowardly serve the evil, winged First Masters even though freedom lies easily within their grasp. Or there's always the barbaric horde of Rokin the Gold—crude, lowbrow raiders who Kane nevertheless comes to respect for the sheer passion with which they live.

As with much of Robert E. Howard's work—and, honestly, most of the early pulp masters—it's this respect for the individual, the enshrining of action and free will as the ultimate good, that permeates Moorcock's last adventure in this series. It is, at its heart, a rebellion against the modern world where—much like the men of Cend-Amrid—many of us feel trapped as tiny cogs in a vast machine, one whose function we have little control over. And if there's anything that Moorcock's writing offers us, it's freedom. In a world where "escapist" is often a derogatory term, Moorcock stands up and wears the label proudly, and Masters of the Pit is a shining example.

I don't know about you, but I'm with him.

James Sutter
Planet Stories Editor

A New Adventure on Old Mars!

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

(WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD. Those who have not yet read City of the Beast should seriously consider doing so before pressing onward.)

Although it stands on its own as a novel, Michael Moorcock's Lord of the Spiders picks up immediately where the events of City of the Beast left off. In the second of the Kane of Old Mars books, Moorcock brings us a slightly darker series of adventures for the American physicist and duelist Michael Kane. Pulled back to Earth on the eve of his engagement to the beautiful Princess Shizala, Kane begins this story frantically preparing a second version of his matter transport machine, this time with only the narrator (Mr. Edward P. Bradbury/Michael Moorcock himself) to assist and fund his endeavors. Yet when the switch is finally thrown and Kane goes hurtling through the aether to arrive on Mars's surface, he finds things very different from when he left. The Blue Giant savages he remembers are now civilized and in the midst of a bloody civil war, and the free peoples of the south are marching on each other over false accusations. Has Michael Kane arrived on the same planet, only to find himself centuries in the future? And are his cunning and sword arm enough to free downtrodden peoples—both blue-skinned and otherwise—from the rule of tyrants? Only an adventure worthy of Michael Moorcock—complete with airships and spider-people, false gods and throne-room assassinations—will reveal the truth.

And now, an excerpt from Lord of the Spiders:

They gibbered and fell back for a moment, a terrible twittering noise, like that of thousands of bats, filling the air and echoing on and on through the complex of chambers.

Bac Puri's sword swung to left and right, up and down, slicing off limbs, stabbing vitals, piercing the unnaturally soft, clammy bodies.

And then he was, as if by magic, a mass of spears. He howled in his pain and madness as javelins like the one we had seen earlier appeared in every part of his body until it was almost impossible to distinguish the man beneath.

He fell with a crash.

Seeing the creatures were at least mortal, I decided we should take advantage of Bac Puri's mad attack and, waving my sword, I leapt through the entrance, shouting:

"Come—they can be slain!"

They could be slain, but they were elusive creatures and sight and feel of them brought physical revulsion. With the others behind me, I carried the attack to them and soon found myself in a tangle of soft, yielding flesh that seemed boneless.

And the faces! They were vile parodies of human faces and again resembled nothing quite so much as the ugly little vampire bat of Earth. Flat faces with huge nostrils let into the head, gashes of mouths full of sharp little fangs, half-blind eyes, dark and wicked—and insensate.

As I fought their claws, their sharp teeth and their spears, they slithered about, gibbering and twittering.

I had been wrong about them. There was not a trace of intelligence in their faces—just a demoniac blood-hunger, a dark malevolence that hated, hated, hated—but never reasoned.

My companions and I stood shoulder to shoulder, back to back, as the things tore at us…

James Sutter
Planet Stories Editor

City of the Beast

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

As the second book to be released by Planet Stories, City of the Beast couldn't be more perfect for the line. First off, you've got Michael Moorcock, arguably one of the most important sword and sorcery authors of all time, the man who created the original fantasy anti-hero, Elric of Melniboné, and popularized such concepts as the "multiverse." Now add in the fact that City of the Beast, the first in Moorcock's Kane of Old Mars trilogy, sends this aspect of his Eternal Champion to the red planet in an epic homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs, and you've got the makings of an epic sword and planet romp.

In City of the Beast, an accident in a high-security government lab sends top physicist and expert fencer Michael Kane hurtling through space and time to a Mars of millions of years ago, in an age when the planet was still rife with life. There he meets the beautiful princess Shizala, as well as the merciless blue giants who besiege her home. Using the sword training of his youth and a tactical mind earned in the jungles of Vietnam, Michael Kane bolsters the city's defense against the barbarians, earning the respect of the locals with his quick wit and wrist. But when Shizala is betrayed by one of her own and kidnapped by the giants, Earthman Michael Kane must set out across a hostile planet in order to bring her home.

With fantastic cover art by Andrew Hou and an introduction by Kim Mohan, former editor of Amazing Stories, City of the Beast is a work of love by a master of the field. Watch for it here and in stores everywhere this September.

James Sutter
Editor, Planet Stories

And Hou!

Friday, May 25, 2007

While Wayne Reynolds has been getting a lot of press for his Pathfinder covers (and rightly so!), I'd like to stop for a minute and call out one of the other exemplary artists that Paizo will be featuring heavily in the year to come.

Though so far we've only given you a tiny taste with the Sandpoint mayor headshot from Monday's blog post, artist Andrew Hou will be playing a key role in the visual development of Pathfinder. While you probably know him best from his work in Dragon and Dungeon, Andrew will also be signing on as one of the lead interior artists in charge of making Pathfinder one of the most visually stunning products Paizo's ever produced. In addition, he's also just finished work on several covers for the Planet Stories novel line, coming through with a perfect blend of nostalgia and modernity that captures the essence of the books' original covers while still making them pop from the shelves—to see what I mean, just look at the blue giant piece, which is currently slated to grace the cover of Michael Moorcock's City of the Beast.

We hope you're as excited to have Andrew on board as we are, and expect to see plenty of his new Pathfinder art previewed here in the weeks to come.

James Sutter
Assistant Editor, Pathfinder