(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.
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…
Here at Planet Stories, we've had a number of fortunate turns that have helped us go from the wistful dream of pulp-loving Erik Mona to a publisher that gets to unearth and reintroduce some of the best and most important fantasy and SF of the last century. And of all our lucky breaks, perhaps our greatest is our relationship with Michael Moorcock. In addition to having us publish his Kane of Old Mars series (three books that include City of the Beast, Lord of the Spiders, and the forthcoming Masters of the Pit), Moorcock has also written a number of insightful introductions for our other books, and has even pointed us to a few potential Planet Stories authors—after all, he's been reading this stuff longer than most of our staff has been alive.
Why is that such a big deal? Only because Michael Moorcock is, without a doubt, one of the most important and influential fantasy authors alive. He began editing the magazine Tarzan Adventures when he was fifteen years old—fifteen!—and in the decades since has written dozens of novels that have inspired generations. He's won the Nebula Award. The World Fantasy Award. The British Fantasy Award (twice!). The Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award. He's even in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. And in the course of winning those accolades, he's given us some of the genre's most memorable characters, particularly Elric of Melniboné, the skinny albino who, with his black sword Stormbringer, is perhaps the most famous of Moorcock's Eternal Champions.
The idea of a reprehensible anti-hero in fantasy; the concept of an eternal battle, not between good and evil, but between law and chaos; even the term "multiverse" to describe overlapping dimensions—all of these are things popularized by Moorcock that have since become pillars of the fantasy world, both in fiction and in gaming. He's been cited as an influence by everyone from Neil Gaiman to China Miéville, and his work remains as relevant today as it was 40 years ago.
All of which is why we're so honored to be working with him. If you haven't already, do yourself a favor and check out City of the Beast or Lord of the Spiders and get a taste of SF history at its finest.
While we haven't completely finished the cover for Michael Moorcock's Lord of the Spiders, the sequel to City of the Beast, we wanted to jump the gun a bit and show off this great new painting from Planet Stories' go-to artistic visionary Andrew Hou. His cover for our first Moorcock book is one of my favorites, and I'm excited to see such a fitting successor!
Michael Moorcock is a living legend, one of the writers who helped define sword sorcery fantasy (heck, he created the term "multiverse"), and I'm glad that in republishing his work, we're able to do it the sort of justice it deserves.
New Blog Entries
