Douglas Draa's page

Hi!
The Llarn books are great fun.
someone mentioned "Maza of the moon" by klinein a previous post.
The book is great while it's sooo over the top1
It is of course dated, but that didn't impede my enjoyment last year when I read it!! I think that it holds up much better that the "Lensman" series by smith.
The Kane series by KEW is probably (IMHO) the 2nd greatest Sword and Sorcery series ever writeen. BUT!! The content is very ADULT!!
Lots of Andre´ Norton's earlier works are out of print. These are almost all Planetary Adventure stories. Lots of mutant tlelpathic animals, young protagonists, newly discovered planets with ancient civilizations ect. ect.
Perfect stuff for a series called Planet Stories..
Here are a few..

Sargasso of space.
Daybrak 2250 A.D.
Storm over Warlock.
Eye of the monster.
Secret of the Lost Race
Operation time Search (a fellow goes back in time and gets involved in the war between Atlantis and Mu!! :-)

Beast Master is sadly still in print!! The movie was good and of course and the book is so much better.

Well that's it for now! Gotta get back to work!!
BUT I STILL THINK THAT PROF: JAMESON AND THE ZOROMES ARE A GREAT CHOICE!! :-)
Take care.
Doug

Hi!
I just went and posted my review at Amazon.de (I'm a Buckeye abroad)
Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.
I hope that it helps.
take care.
Doug

Here is my complete review of "The Secret of Sinharat"

Let me start off by saying that this is the first book review that i have ever written.. so cut me some slack! :-)

Paizo has taken a big chance here by attempting to introduce classic works of Adventure SF and Fantasy to a new/younger audience. And so far it seems to be paying off if the activity on the message boards is any indication.
I have a new subscription to the series and my first volume arrived today.
“The Secret of Sinharrat ( with “The People of the Talisman”) is probably Leigh Brackett’s most famous work or at least it features her most famous character “Eric John Stark”.
This is the 3rd edition I own of the book. I first discovered LB waaaaay back in the early 70’s when an older cousin of mine gave me a pile of the old “Ace Double” paperbacks. For those of you who don’t remember them these were a very long running series of 241 Science Fiction/Fantasy paperback series from Ace Books from the 1950’s up to the early 1970’s.
The contents were usually one short novel from a famous writer and one short novel from a newer writer. The novelty was that the 2 novels were not printed one after the other. You would read one novel and then flip the book over (which made the back cover the front cover) and read the next novel. So these were paperbacks that 2 different “Front covers”.
Anyways one of these caught my eye right off. On one side it showed a man dressed somewhat in barbarian fashion riding some sort of large reptile beast across a night time desert landscape while being pursued by other figures who were similarly mounted .
My 11 year old brain thought “Cool!”.
As I started to read it I became very excited when I realized that this was two novels set on a Mars that was very similar to the Mars/Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
But after reading a few pages of the first novel I became kind of confused. The good guy was actually sort of a bad guy who is forced / black mailed into helping the law stop a planned uprising of the locals.
Eric John Stark was the first Anti-hero I ever came into contact with. He lives in a universe where it seems that at least all of the inner planets of the Solar System are habitable.
You have to understand that even into the 1950’s no one was 100% sure of the conditions that existed on the other planets. So the popular conceptions in the minds of many folks were

Mars is a dying desert world that is much older than ours.
Venus is a young dynamic tropical hothouse of a world that is younger than ours.
Mercury is hot as hell, doesn’t rotate on its axis and is probably only liveable at the terminator existing between the day and night sides.
This is the universe that Eric John Stark was born into. He is a mixture between Tarzan and Clint Eastwood’s “Man with no name”.
Stark was born on mercury in a mining colony where his parents worked as geologists. They were killed in a landslide and he was adopted as a baby and raised by the mercurian aborigines who are/were more or less an art of Neanderthal and given the name “N’Chaka” which means “He with no Tribe”
When he was 12 years old his tribe gets wiped by Terran miners and he is caged and tormented by the men who murdered his people. He gets raised and civilized by an agent of this universes UN interplanetary police.
We have some serious Tarzan parallels going on here! :-)
He spends the large part of his adult life as a mercenary helping the natives of Mars and Venus in their attempts to throw off the yoke of Earth.
This is some serious stuff here! This is not Burroughs romanticized Mars with its noble warlike inhabitants who are taken as they are and seen from the perspective of their own cultures.
This is Mars from the gutter up that has been exploited and “colonialized” by the Earth (white folks that is.). Imagine Barsoom going straight to hell after the big earth corporations show up and exploit the hell out of the place, keeping down the natives and basically treating them as 3rd class nuisances! We don’t see Mars from the eyes of its Ruling Class. We get a Mars from the perspective of its lower classes. These are people who are being screwed over by not just their own rulers but also the colonial powers from earth. LB’s Martians are cut throats, thieves and whores who we see from the context of our culture and not theirs. This is a sad, worn out, angry, brutal and cynical Mars. It’s not really a place you’d care to visit. And if you did bother to visit, the locals would cut your throat the first chance they got.

What is so great with Leigh Brackett is that her women are as tough as the men and maybe tougher.
If you have ever seen the old westerns by Howard Hawks; Rio Lobo, Rio Bravo and El Dorado starring John Wayne, you might have notice how tough and strong the female characters are. That’s not just because Hawks loved tough “dames”. Leigh Brackett was his favourite Screenwriter. She wrote the scripts to at least 4 Howard Hawks’s films starring John Wayne.
So what we have here is “Film noir” Science Fiction. The good guys aren’t really all that good. They are just good in comparison to the true villains.
Both novels included in this volume are 2 stark adventures the LB expanded to novel size. Both deal with Stark being forced into helping people against his own interests and better judgement. I won’t give too much away aside from saying that these are very adult stories. When I say “adult” I mean “adult” in an emotional sense. These are stories full of wonder that are set a SF universe that is not wonderful. The “ERBzine” website has a great article on this subject. Check it out. It is called “Colonial Barsoom”.
And did I mention that Eric John Stark is to my knowledge the first BLACK hero?
That’s right, he black! He was burned black by the searing rays of the sun over Mercury.
In the “Secret of Sinharat” one of the villains even refers to him as a”black ape”!
And big Hats off to Paizo for having the first cover art ever that doesn’t portray him as a white man.
I would also like to mention that the Paizo edition is a very nice book. Well bound, large format and with very thick covers. This will look great in my collection!

“The Secret of Sinharat” is the book for you if you love SF adventure where the wonder and adventure are matched with brilliant writing, great dialog and people who behave like real people.

Ok, Planet Stories readers! Do me a favor and head over to the link Doug just posted. Scroll all the way to the bottom until you get to the montage of images of cone-headed robots with tentacle arms.

Would you buy a novel in which every single character looked like that?

Hey! That's misleading the jury!! :-)

Every single character doesn't look like that.
ONLY THE ZEROMES!! :-)
In every story they run up against a different race of beings to either help or ahnilate
So doen't be so speciescentric!
Who wants to read stories where every character is a bipedal humanoid? LOL

Take care.
Doug

I've been accumulating the Professor Jameson stories, and recently read the first of them. It's interesting, but I'm a little nervous what the audience might make of a band of interstellar adventurers that all look like modrons.

Here is some decent "Zorome" art.

and as far as modrons are concerned.. I thought gamers were open minden?
:-)

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3k.html

Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page.
Take care.
Doug

I've been accumulating the Professor Jameson stories, and recently read the first of them. It's interesting, but I'm a little nervous what the audience might make of a band of interstellar adventurers that all look like modrons.

I hear the second story (Planet of the Double-Sun?) is quite compelling, so I have high hopes for the rest of the series.

This is exactly the sort of stuff I've been reading lately. My fingers smell like pulps and my apartment is filled with paper chips and flakes! :)

SPOILER ALERT!!!

Planet of the Double Suns is great! It deals with ovelapping/parallel universes!
Take care.
Doug

Hi!
How about the Prof. Jameson series by Neil R. Jones?
These were written back in the 1930's and early 1940's.
They've only been reprinted/collected once. That was by Ace Books back in the late 1960's (I still have my copies!).
Prof. Jameson had his body (after his death.) placed in an artificial satellite orbiting the Earth. This was how he planned on keeping his corpse perfectly preserved for eternity.
Millions of years later he is still orbiting the (now dead) Earth where it is discovered by a "Zerome" ship. The "Zeromes" are a race of benevolent machine men. The were once normal biological beings. But they figured that machin bodies were better suited to explore the galaxy, so all the spacefaring "Zeromes" have volentarily abandoned their flesh and blood bodies in exchange for robot bodies. They discover Prof. Jamesons PERFECTLY PRESERVED corpse. They place his brain in a machine body and revive him. He decides he likes being a machine man and enjoys the company of the "Zeromes". So they go flying around the galaxy have great adventures and helping other beings to boot.
They stories have aged amazingly well and have a genuine sense of wonder about them.
I bet that the reprint right are fairly cheap! LOL
Here are a few Prof. Jameson links...

http://thenostalgialeague.com/olmag/jameson.html
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_R._Jones
http://www.meteor25.fsnet.co.uk/
http://davidszondy.com/future/robot/jameson.htm

Take care.
Doug

Favorite Returning character/s???

Nr.1: ME!!!!
Nr.2: Remo Williams
Nr.3: Tarzan
Nr.4: Doc Savage
Nr.5: John Carter
Nr.6: Agent Pendergast
Nr.7: Eric John Stark
Nr.8: Conan the Cimmerian
Nr.9: Solomon Kane
Nr.10 Luis Wu
Nr.11:David Innes
Nr.12: Carson Naper
Nr.13: Cthulhu

Take care.
Doug

Hi!
I only have two words to offer....

GRAVEYARD RATS!!!!

Take care.
Doug

Hi!
I'm 46 years old,
so names like Kuttner, Moore, Burroughs, Leiber, Weinbaum, Del Rey, Heinlein, Simak, Hamilton, Brackett, Campbell, Pohl, Anderson, Bradbury, Blish, Clarke, Silverberg, Ellison, Brown, Russell, Williamson, Smith ect. ect. were still in every book store back in the early 70's. Most of the stuff from the 30's, 40's and 50's was still around. so these guys were household names for SF fans. But those days are sadly gone. I read somewhere that media related SF and Fantasy has the lions share of the market. So if you guys need to utilize authors who are associated with gamming to introduce newer/youger readers to these great "old time" authors then go ahead by all means!
What wouldn't be a bad idea though is anthologies of Sword and Sorcery or Sword and Planet stories written by newer/younger writers using modern sensibilties.
I mean, for example, how would a young adult from our day and age react to a rigid culture like Burroughs described in his Barsoom series?
"What? I have to kill this guy and his entire extended family just because he might of had some unpure thoughts about the Princess?"

Take care.
Doug

Favorite Mars?

Burroughs Barsoom

Leigh Brackett's "Colonial Barsoom" stories.

Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles.

The Leigh Brackett pastiches by Lin Carter.

Moorcocks 3 Mars books.

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

Red Planet by Robert Heinlein

The Hall of the Martian Kings by John Varley (novelette)

Old Faithful by Raymond Z. Gallun (novelette)

Martian Odyssy by Stanly G. Weinbaum (short story)

The Martian Way by Isaac Asimov (novelette)

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (oops! soory, that's a record.)

Take care.
Doug

1. Have you purchased a Planet Stories novel or anthology yet? If so, which one(s)?

My Subscription has started with Brackett's Sinherat.
I've back ordered through amazon the C.L. Moore, Moorcock and Kuttner volumes.

2. What author in the Planet Stories line most interests you?

Leigh Brackett

3. Please list the following genres in the order you would prefer that we focus on in late 2008 and beyond:

Sword & Planet
Sword & Sorcery
Lost Worlds Tales
Space Opera
Science Fiction
"Weird" Fiction
Horror/Gothic Fantasy
Jungle Tales

4. What can I do to get you to buy more Planet Stories books?

Please, not too many books by newbie writers. I know that they deserve their chance, but a series titled "PLANET STORIES" can't wander too far from it's roots. I have a subscription, but if I (IMHO) receive too many duds then I'll cancel and stick to individual volumes. I figure that if I subscribe it will help the series get started and grow.

5. If we offer a monthly subscription with, say, a 30% discount off the cover price, would you consider subscribing?

WHAT!! 30%?? how come I'm only getting a lousy 20%???? :-)

Take care.
Doug

Hi!
I have a new subscription that begins with "The Secret of Sinherat".
Will i also receive a copy of the elak stories or do i have to order it extra?
Thanks and take care.
Doug

Hi!
I have another question.
I have no idea if some stories have more expensive "re-print rights" than others, but have you looked in the the series of KANE stories and novels written by Karl Edward Wagner? These are some of the most amazing Sword&Sorcery stories ever written. They are a fantastic mix of Sword&Sorcery,Horror and Super Science!!
Plus Kane is one of the most interesting/maddening "protaganists" ever written.
I'm overjoyed that you will also be reprinting O.A. Kline! Have you looked into his novel "Maza of the Moon". It is terribly dated in most ways, but it is still one of the most enjoyable books I've read in the past few years.
Who has the rights now for ERB's Venus series?
And I hope thet sales are good enough to keep this series going until you run out of authors to print!
Take care.
Doug

Hi!
I subscribed yesterday!!! Just haven't told my wife yet :-)
Anyways, I have a question.
Are you going to be mostly publishing reprints of "classic" matrial or will this series be more and more original stories?
I subscribed for the "Classic" books and not new material that is tied into some Roleplaying-universe. As long as I will be receiving "mostly" classic reprints I will be more than happy to keep my subscription running.
Have you thought of reprinting some of Lin Carter's books? Like the Thongor series? Carter's Sword & Sorcery/ Sword & Planet stories were always a little goofy, but still great fun.
What makes me sooooo happy with this series is that I hate to keep re-reading my old paperbacks from the 60's and 70's. They are in too good of shape to be damaging (but books are meant to be read and not just collected.). So now I have nice reading copies that'll also look great on my bookshelf!
Leigh Brackett needs to be exposed to a new genaration. Her sensibilities haven't become dated and so should still be very accessable to a newer/younger audience .
Sorry for rambling! :-)
Doug