Setting Sail with the Walrus & the Warwolf!
Our Price:
$17.99
Unavailable
Get this Classic by Hugh Cook now!
Have you ever had a favorite book or author that you just can't understand how anyone could let slip out of print? Has your frustration about that fact ever led you to a career in publishing with a goal to one day get the book back in print even if you have to do it yourself? I have. And here's the story.
Back in the 1980s, I came across a bizarre book called Wizard War in the local bookstore. No doubt influenced by a cover blurb from none other than Gary Gygax, I bought the book and immediately began to devour its tale of wizards and warriors in a world-spanning story set on a planet so far into the future that it felt like a traditional fantasy. This was a decade before I'd read Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories, but I immediately saw the appeal of this type of setting. After reading the HUGE paperback, I picked up a handful of sequels, which I also enjoyed. All were written by a New Zealand author named Hugh Cook. I devoured the following few books, and immediately set out to learn more. My local library had a copy of a few British editions of the same books, only instead of being called the "Wizard War Saga," they had the much more appealing title: Chronicles of an Age of Darkness. And there were TEN of them!
But there was a problem. The series title wasn't the only thing that changed. My beloved Wizard War was originally The Wizards & the Warriors. The two American market sequels were actually one British book inexplicably broken into two tiny paperbacks. And the very best book in the series, The Walrus & the Warwolf, only appeared once in America, under the title Lords of the Sword and comprising only about a third of the British edition. The publisher thereafter folded, leaving six-and-a-half books completely unpublished in America. I conned traveling friends to pick up the whole series for me while in London, and read all of them with joy and aplomb.
And I kept looking for Hugh Cook's name at my local bookstores. And I never saw it. How could this be? All my friends and even my fantasy-shunning little brother loved the books, so how come some fool had let them fall out of print? I attribute my drive to become a publisher in part upon the sad American fate of The Walrus & the Warwolf, Hugh Cook's very best book. This is the book I started Planet Stories to publish.
If no other fool was going to republish this book, I was willing to step up and fix the problem myself. It took a while to get everything sorted out in terms of format (it's a LOOOONG book, and I now understand why the former publisher cut it into little parts), and I knew that the best way to present the book to a new audience was to get superstar author China Miéville to write the introduction. I kept thinking of Hugh Cook as I read China's Perdido St. Station and The Scar, and when I asked if he'd be interested he commented that many other readers (most of them British, naturally) had wondered if he had been influenced by the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness. China hadn't actually read Hugh Cook before I sent him this book, but his loving introduction confirms the book's quality.
As China says: "This epic picaresque is astoundingly full of stuff, precisely the stuff that gets our sweet spots. Pirates! Monsters! Wizards! Battles! Pirates! Sex! Pirates! Misunderstood robots from an ancient high-tech past! Really excellent monsters! Etc! Also pirates!"
I couldn't have said it better myself. And so, after an eternity of absence in the American market, I give you the very best Chronicle of an Age of Darkness, Hugh Cook's masterpiece, The Walrus & the Warwolf!
Erik Mona
Publisher
Paizo Publishing
More Blog.
I am curious, however, as to whether or not you will be publishing the rest of this series...
I hope my shipment arrives before I go on holidays!
I don't know if it is because of the praise the book got here, but in a long, loooong time, this is the first book I am very excited about!
Thanx for publishing it, I hope I get what I hope for...
I read most, if not all of this series, years ago, and I absolutely loved it. I am glad to find it published again!
I'm definitely going to have to pick this up. I feel a little embarrassed as a New Zealander that I haven't read it yet!
DM Doom wrote: I am curious, however, as to whether or not you will be publishing the rest of this series... My sentiment also. I'd buy these. Of course, I pretty much buy everything Paizo.
' I attribute my drive to become a publisher in part upon the sad American fate of The Walrus & the Warwolf, Hugh Cook's very best book. This is the book I started Planet Stories to publish'.
This little statement puts everything into a perspective I can finally understand about Planet Stories! ;) One thing about these Hugh Cook 'Chronicle of...' books that I don't understand is that no one seems to have known about them or whatever,but here in Australia they've all been in the charity bins for $1 for years. You can walk into any second hand bookshop here and find at least 2 or 3 of that series in the section that no one even bothers looking in,you know? I assume that it must have sold quite a few copies at the time,because there are so many of them around in second hand bookshops and charity shops. They are in the same place as all the other 80's series like Julian May and Jack Chalker and who's that other guy that everyone used to love?...the one about the dude who doesn't believe he's in the story or whatever the hell it was about? Thomas Covenant? Was that the author or the character? Whatever,it's just that no one wants any of that stuff as far as I can see. Everyone has different taste (especially me it seems!) but it's definitely a generational thing. Speaking of which,I just finished the best book I've read in years....'The Skrayling Tree',Michael Moorcock. Now that's what I call good writing!! 9/10...no,10!! The adventures of Hiawatha in the Multiverse...eh? How could that not be cool? ;))
Elflock wrote: ~Interesting Aussie stuff~ Nah, you really have to look for them over here. I still don't have the second half of the second book (published separately over here as The Heroes Return) after scouring several of my used book treasure troves for some time.
Mairkurion {tm} wrote: Elflock wrote: ~Interesting Aussie stuff~ Nah, you really have to look for them over here. I still don't have the second half of the second book (published separately over here as The Heroes Return) after scouring several of my used book treasure troves for some time. Yeah,of course finding the ONE volume that you are missing is a whole other story. We have a bookfair every 6 months where they have all these 80's series shrink-wrapped together for about $1 or $2 per book,that would be the best way to get them (they bundle the whole series if they have them complete) They always have these Hugh Cook ones along with all the David Eddings,Raymond Feist,Alan Dean Foster,all the others I mentioned,Jack Chalker etc. etc. I just looked for these online,you can pick the old paperbacks up pretty cheap,like $1.18 I saw somewhere for the first book,but then there are people selling some of them for $48 each too(unfortunately,the second volume is the one!)so whatever,they are probably a bit scarcer these days I suppose,don't know. I got an Ebook reader...all this becomes a non-issue! You can just get everything that you are missing from any series. I love this thing! There seems to be a lot of discussion about the formats that ebooks come in,but you can just convert anything to a normal text file and use that in my little machine,it's great,much better than holding a thick book open and that...but I wouldn't buy a Kindle! Way too expensive! And you have to sell your soul to Amazon!
Recent threads in Planet Stories®
|
