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