Appendix N Book Club

Hoi and Jeff discuss Andre Norton's "Witch World" with special guest Fletcher Vredenburgh.

Hoi and Jeff discuss J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Fellowship of the Ring" with special guest Daniel J. Bishop.

Hoi and Jeff discuss H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness & Other Tales of Terror with special guest Bob “The Voice” Brinkman! Given H.P. Lovecraft’s omnipresence today, it’s easy to forget that he had largely faded out of reading public’s mind within a few years of his death in 1937. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei did their best to keep Lovecraft in print by founding the small press Ar...

Hoi and Jeff discuss Clark Ashton Smith's "Zothique" with special guest Andy Markham.

Hoi and Jeff discuss Margaret St. Clair's "The Shadow People" with special guest Julian Bernick.

Abraham Grace Merritt (better known by his byline A. Merritt) has the odd distinction of being perhaps second only to Edgar Rice Burroughs in popularity as a writer of fantastic fiction during the first half of the 20th century, only to be largely forgotten today. Perhaps this is because Merritt’s relatively small body of work didn’t feature recurring iconic heroes like John Carter of Mars or Cona...

The Eyes of the Overworld (Ace Books, 1966) marks Jack Vance’s return to the Dying Earth setting after a break of 15 years. The book is a fix-up of the stories “The Overworld”, “The Mountains of Magnatz”, “The Sorceror Pharesm”, “The Pilgrims” and “The Manse of Iucounu” all of which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction between December 1965 and August 1966. To these stories Vance...

Swords Against Death (Ace Books, 1970) by Fritz Leiber was originally published in paperback as part of Ace Books’ complete seven volume saga of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Although Swords Against Death is second in the series chronology, it was actually the fifth book published. The stories is this volume are “The Circle Curse” (1970), “The Jewels in the Forest” (1939), “Thieves’ House” (1943), “...

Conan of Cimmeria (Lancer Books, 1969) by Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, and Lin Carter was part of first comprehensive paperback edition of the Conan saga. Conan of Cimmeria was the seventh volume published, although it is second in the internal chronology--later printings of the series numbered the books in chronological order. When Lancer when out of business in 1973, Ace Books picked up...

L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall first saw light as a short story in the December 1939 issue of Unknown magazine before being expanded into a full novel for hardcover publication by Henry Holt & Company in 1941. Unknown was the companion magazine to Astounding, both of which were edited by John W. Campbell, the godfather of the “Golden Age of Science Fiction”. Campbell had taken the reins o...

Lin Carter has a multi-faceted reputation in the world of fantastic fiction. As an editor and critic, he is virtually indispensable, most notably for his role in editing the landmark Ballantine Adult Fantasy series (BAFS), as well as the subsequent Flashing Swords!, The Year's Best Fantasy, and Weird Tales anthologies. Carter’s legacy as a writer is considerably more muddied by his “posthumous col...

There’s surprisingly little reliable biographical information about Sterling E. Lanier, but like many Appendix N authors he does seem to have been a man of many parts. Most accounts of Lanier’s life have him studying archaeology and anthropology at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania before working as a researcher and historian for most of the 1950s. His other interests included sculpture,...

J.R.R. Tolkien and perhaps Robert E. Howard aside, no Appendix N author has had as a large a pop culture footprint as Gardner F. Fox, but not for any of the works cited by Gary Gygax. Although hardly a household name today, Gardner Fox was among other things one of the most prolific comic book writers of the 20th Century. Fox was originally a practicing attorney in New York City, but still must ha...

Michael Moorcock’s first five Elric of Melniboné stories appeared in the British magazine Science Fantasy in 1962 and were collected in hardcover the next year as The Stealer of Souls, followed by a U.S. paperback edition from Lancer Books in 1967. Savage and sardonic, the Elric stories must have seemed like a fantasy off-shoot of Great Britain’s “Angry Young Man” movement of that era. At first gl...

At first glance John Bellairs’s The Face in the Frost is a bit of an anomaly, both in his own body of work and in Appendix N. It is the only Bellairs work cited by Gary Gygax in Appendix N, and ended up being Bellairs’s first and only fantasy novel directed at adults. Bellairs began work on The Face in the Frost in the late 1960s after reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. He created his...

Roger Zelazny stated that he wrote Jack of Shadows as a “first draft, no rewrite”, which might account for the occasionally elliptical nature of the narrative. Any lack of cohesion in the plotting is compensated for by the dark majesty of Jack AKA Shadowjack’s world. Zelazny is clearly echoing Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories here, at least in the weirdness of the creatures and landscapes of the d...

Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions was originally serialized in 1953 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction--eight years later a revised and expanded version of the tale would see print in hardcover from Doubleday, followed by an Avon paperback in 1962. It has remained sporadically in print ever since, largely overshadowed by Anderson’s more famous science fiction works. Although...

In retrospect, the publication of Philip José Farmer’s The Maker of Universes (Ace Books, 1965) marks the beginning of the most productive and rewarding phase of Farmer’s writing career. It can hardly have seemed that way at the time, as Farmer was toiling away as a technical writer in Scottsdale, Arizona to support himself and his family. Even though Farmer had been a published writer as of 1946...

Fletcher Pratt’s The Blue Star first saw print in the hardcover anthology Witches Three (Twayne Publishers, 1952), which also included Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife and James Blish’s “There Shall be No Darkness”. Pratt himself was the uncredited editor of the Witches Three, which ended up being the second and final volume in the short-lived “Twayne Triplets” series of themed hardcover fantastic fict...

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first Pellucidar book At the Earth’s Core was part of the supernova period at the beginning of his writing career, wherein he managed to write 25 novels between 1911-1915! The serialization of At the Earth’s Core in All-Story Weekly magazine in 1914 represents the extraordinary feat of launching three major literary franchises in a mere three years, following on the Mars/Bars...

The Hobbit first came to Oxford University professor J.R.R. Tolkien when he was grading papers in the early 1930s. Coming upon a blank page in an exam book, he suddenly wrote “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Tolkien worked on The Hobbit for the next several years before submitting it for publication in 1936 as a children’s book to George Allen & Unwin, then known mainly as an academ...

Special guest Gavin Norman (author of The Complete Vivimancer and Theorems & Thaumaturgy) joins us to discuss Jack Vance‘s The Dying Earth! Jack Vance originally wrote the loosely connected stories that comprise The Dying Earth while serving in the United States Merchant Marine during World War II. Vance’s fiction had started appearing in pulp magazines as early as 1945, and The Dying Earth marked...

Swords and Deviltry (Ace Books, 1970) by Fritz Leiber was originally published in paperback as part of Ace Books’ complete seven volume saga of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Although Swords and Deviltry is first in the series chronology, it was actually the fourth book published. Leiber and his lifelong friend Harry Otto Fischer created Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in an exchange of letters in 1934, b...

Conan (Lancer Books, 1967) by Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, and Lin Carter was part of first comprehensive paperback edition of the Conan saga. Conan was the fifth volume published, although it is first in the internal chronology--later printings of the series numbered the books in chronological order. When Lancer when out of business in 1973, Ace Books picked up and completed the series,...

The Compleat Enchanter by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt is a compilation of the first three novellas in the Harold Shea/Enchanter series, “The Roaring Trumpet” (1940), “The Mathematics of Magic” (1940), and “The Castle of Iron” (1941, revised 1950). The Compleat Enchanter was first published as a Nelson Doubleday/Science Fiction Book Club hardcover in 1975 before being released as a Del Re...