Sojan the Swordsman ; Under the Warrior Sky
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PRAISE FOR
Michael Moorcock
“One of the most important writers not just to cross the barrier between science
fiction and literature but to melt it—as with a blowtorch!”
Samuel R. Delany, author of Dhalgren
“The greatest writer of post-Tolkien British fantasy.”
Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
“Vastly entertaining.”
William Gibson, author of Neuromancer
“Unquestionably the most varied and prolific of SF authors.”
A Reader’s Guide to Science Fiction
“Michael Moorcock is a true literary wonder. I’m a lifelong reader and fan.”
Greg Bear, author of Darwin’s Radio
“If you are at all interested in fantastic fiction, you must read Michael Moorcock.”
Tad Williams, author of Shadowplay
PRAISE FOR
Joe R. Lansdale
“An immense talent.”
Booklist
“Lansdale is an American original with a storytelling style distinctly his own.”
Publishers Weekly
“A born storyteller.”
Robert Bloch, author of Psycho
“Joe Lansdale is a hell of a good writer.”
Philip Jose Farmer, author of Riverworld
“A cult figure.”
People Magazine
“A folklorist’s eye for storytelling and a front-porch raconteur’s sense of pace.”
The New York Times Book Review
THE PLANET STORIES LIBRARY
Sos the Rope by Piers Anthony
Steppe by Piers Anthony
The Ginger Star by Leigh Brackett
The Hounds of Skaith by Leigh Brackett
The Reavers of Skaith by Leigh Brackett
The Secret of Sinharat by Leigh Brackett
The Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett
The Walrus & The Warwolf by Hugh Cook
Infernal Sorceress by Gary Gygax
The Anubis Murders by Gary Gygax
The Samarkand Solution by Gary Gygax
Death in Delhi by Gary Gygax
Almuric by Robert E. Howard
Template by Matthew Hughes
The Swordsman of Mars by Otis Adelbert Kline
The Outlaws of Mars by Otis Adelbert Kline
The Dark World by Henry Kuttner
Elak of Atlantis by Henry Kuttner
Robots Have No Tails by Henry Kuttner
Worlds of Their Own edited by James Lowder
The Ship of lshtar by A. Merritt
City of the Beast by Michael Moorcock
Lord of the Spiders by Michael Moorcock
Masters of the Pit by Michael Moorcock
Black God’s Kiss by C.L. Moore
Northwest of Earth by C.L. Moore
Before They Were Giants edited by James L. Sutter
Battle in the Dawn by Manly Wade Wellman
Who Fears the Devil? by Manly Wade Wellman
STRANGE ADVENTURES ON OTHER WORLDS
AVAILABLE EXCLUSIVELY FROM PLANET STORIES!
FOR AUTHOR BIOS AND SYNOPSES,
VISIT PAIZO.COM/PLANETSTORIES
Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data
(Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.)
Moorcock, Michael, 1939-
Sojan the swordsman / by Michael Moorcock; cover illustration by
Kieran Yanner; interior illustrations by James Cawthorn & Claudio
Casini; introduction by Erik Mona. Under the warrior star / by Joe R.
Lansdale.
p. : ill. ; cm. -- (Planet stories; #29)
Planet stories double feature
Sojan the swordsman originally published in 1956.
November 2010.
ISBN: 978-1-60125-288-3
1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Battles—Fiction. 3.
Monsters--
Fiction. 4. Fantasy fiction. 5. Science fiction. I. Yanner, Kieran.
II. Cawthorn, James. III. Casini, Claudio, 1977- IV. Mona, Erik. V.
Lansdale,
Joe R., 1951- Under the warrior star. VI. Title. VII. Title: Planet stories
double feature
PN6120.S33 M66 2010
808.83
Double Feature: Notes from
the Projector Room
by Erik Mona
Four years ago, when I began sketching out the broad overview of the project that would become Planet Stories, the idea of the book you hold in your hands would have been preposterous. For starters, our shoestring budget dictated a focus on affordable reprints rather than new material. Fantasizing about one day releasing original science fiction and fantasy adventures from modern grand masters to stand alongside our reprinted classics by giants of the past seemed like an extravagant dream—something that might happen one day, if we worked hard and were extremely lucky, but in the end highly unlikely. And yet here we are with a brand new Planet Stories book featuring exactly that unlikely development, and it turns out our grand masters have been with us since the very start.
Back in 2007, Joe R. Lansdale wrote the introduction to our edition of Robert E. Howard’s Almuric, a tale that transports a barbaric charactervery much like Conan the Cimmerian to a brutal planet filled with ugly monsters and beautiful princesses. “A few pages in and I was as hooked as bass on a handmade fly, right through the gills,” he wrote. I hoped that meant Joe would be interested in writing his own take on a sword and planet adventure in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars. After all, his Almuric introduction claimed that it had been Burroughs’s planetary adventures that shifted him from wanting to be a writer to needing to be a writer.
“When I was a kid I read Edgar Rice Burroughs for the first time, and his stories blew the top of my head off and sent it into orbit.” One imagines Joe’s reading chair, spattered with blood from all of the times sword and planet has exploded his brain, slashed through his gills, or done him grievous harm while leaving an excited smile on his face. I thought he’d be a shoo-in for a new original story, so I asked if he’d be interested in writing one for us. “Erik,” he said kindly, “you can’t afford me.” And that was that.
Michael Moorcock was also one of our most enthusiastic early readers, and his introduction to Leigh Brackett’s planetary adventure The Secret of Sinharat was an early coup for our fledgling pulp reprint line. Like Lansdale, Moorcock’s discovery of Burroughs at a young age forever changed him. “For half my youth I yearned to be riding some strange, complaining reptilian steed across the dead sea bottoms of Mars, while for the other half I longed to be wearing a trench coat and a snap-brim fedora, walking the rain-sodden streets of the big city.”
Leigh Brackett’s noir-influenced style merged these influences perfectly for Mike. “If my very earliest teenage stories were influenced by Burroughs, there was no doubt that my first published adult fantasy stories were influenced by Brackett.” Mike agreed to let us publish three of those early adult fantasies in the form of his Kane of Old Mars trilogy (City of the Beast, Lord of the Spiders, and Masters of the Pit), but I was even more intrigued by those “earliest teenage stories” about Sojan the Swordsman, written as extended serials in the Tarzan Adventures magazine he edited early in his career. They’d appeared once in a rare British collection, but never in the United States. It seemed the p
erfect opportunity for a new Planet Stories edition. “Those stories were an act of nostalgia, not taste!” Mike wrote back rapidly. “Believe me, you don’t want them!” And that, once again, was that.
What was it about the sword and planet works of Edgar Rice Burroughs that so intrigued not only Joe Lansdale and Mike Moorcock, but also Robert E. Howard, Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton, Manly Wade Wellman, and nearly every other professional science fiction writer born in the last century? Why did so many of these writers not only cite the John Carter stories as influencing them to become writers themselves, but also to follow along in the tradition of John Carter with their own adventures of Earthmen transported to savage planets?
Nearly 100 years ago, Edgar Rice Burroughs published Under the Moons of Mars, a multi-part serial in the pulp pages of All-Story Weekly. The tale concerned the adventures of a Confederate Civil War veteran named John Carter who mysteriously found himself transported to a Red Planet peopled by decadent societies of honor-bound swordsmen, roving tribes of bestial noble savages, armadas of airships and a veritable parade (as the series continued) of incomparable princesses in constant need of rescue from the machinations of nefarious evil-doers. Under the Moons of Mars quickly graduated to books, where it gained a new title, A Princess of Mars, and swiftly became one of the most important and influential science fiction books in the history of the genre.
With little concrete science to speak of and swordplay and barbarism running as major themes in almost every chapter, A Princess of Mars and its sequels were precursors of the sword and sorcery movement that would emerge from the pulp work of writers like C. L. Moore, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. Howard’s Almuric, viewed through a characteristically brutal lens, is the crossroads where sword and planet meets its younger, more fantastical cousin. Like almost all the authors who came to the tradition, Howard brought his own vision and unique elements to the sword and planet tale, but the fingerprints of Edgar Rice Burroughs are everywhere.
By the time Howard got to the trough it had been fairly well picked over by other writers, folks like Ralph Milne Farley, Ray Cummings, and Otis Adelbert Kline. These authors used many of Burroughs’s conceits to chart adventures of their own (usually on other planets such as Venus and Mercury) featuring swordplay and revolution on distant worlds. But, really, it all comes back to the pattern established in the outset of A Princess of Mars.
Roughly stated, the pattern is this:
1) Hero with sword-fighting skill is mysteriously transported from Earth to a savage planet.
2) Hero is surprised at his ability to leap great distances and his relative strength thanks to the lower gravity of his new planet.
3) Hero encounters a dangerous monster.
4) Hero encounters a seemingly evil outsider culture, but then becomes adopted by that culture for his prowess at arms.
5) Hero meets incomparably beautiful Princess. He falls instantly in love.
6) Princess gets kidnapped.
7) Hero rescues Princess.
8) On the eve of Hero and Princess’ wedding, the Hero is mysteriously whisked back to Earth, where he shakes his fist at the sky and swears to get back to the savage planet.
9) The end.
In the pulp era, the best-regarded sword and planet author other than Burroughs was Otis Adelbert Kline, a member of the editorial staff of Weird Tales and a frequent contributor to Argosy, Amazing Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and similar magazines. His pioneering trilogy of Earthman Robert Grandon’s adventures on Venus actually beat Burroughs himself to the Green Planet, and paperback reissues brought his tales to the readers of the 1960s (albeit in badly edited, highly abridged versions). We targeted Kline as one of the key authors for our Planet Stories line, and in 2008 we released Kline’s two Mars adventures, The Swordsman of Mars and The Outlaws of Mars, in handsome trade paperback editions. As with all Planet Stories editions (except for this one), we wanted to get famous writers from today to comment on and contextualize the classic stories in new introductions.
Undaunted and still eager to publish some new sword and planet in the 21st century, we turned once again to our grand masters, Joe Lansdale and Michael Moorcock. Mike’s introduction to Swordsman contained an alluring reference to those old Sojan stories (“none of them, I must say, as good as Kline’s”), as well as additional admiration for Edgar Rice Burroughs and the escapist nature of the sword and planet tradition. Joe Lansdale concentrated on the visual appeal of the worlds painted by the planetary adventure authors. “There is plenty of color and beauty and a sweeping approach to story that reminds me of the cinema,” he said. “In fact, with the popularity of such films as Star Wars and Indiana Jones, I would have thought by now, considering special effects have improved to the point of being almost as incredible as our most astounding dreams, that Burroughs and possibly Kline’s characters would have been updated and filmed. Certainly, it’s this color and sweep and majesty of background that makes these stories so damned appealing: they are like movies in the head.”
And soon, they will be very much like movies in the movie theater. As I write this introduction, Disney’s Pixar studios is hard at work on a big-budget version of A Princess of Mars, set for release some time around the 100th anniversary of the tale’s original publication back in All-Story. Over the last four years, our own Planet Stories has reprinted many of the seminal tales in the sword and planet tradition, from Leigh Brackett’s adventures of the swordsman Eric John Stark to Otis Adelbert Kline’s tales of romance and danger on Mars. Sword and planet reprints are chugging along, and the genre seems more energized now than it has in decades.
But still, you can’t have a renaissance without something new, and after all these reprints we still never got our original sword and planet Planet Stories adventure. Until now. After plying these guys with ratty paperback and pulp copies of some of their favorite sword and planet tales from their youth, they’ve both come around. Mike agreed to let us present all the Sojan stories (slightly updated and corrected here and there) for the first time in an American edition, and Joe finally decided that we could afford him after all. This Planet Stories Double Feature is a two-fisted punch of pulp planetary adventure by two grand masters, one experimenting with the Burroughs tradition in some of his earliest fiction exploits and one drawing his blade anew at the height of his writing career. I trust you will enjoy the tales of Sojan the Swordsman and Braxton Booker. Sword and planet maybe nearing its century mark in these early days of the new millennium, but as long as writers look to the stars and think “I’d love to write a story like that!” the skies will always be full of adventure.
So let’s all go to the lobby and pick up our favorite refreshments. At long last, the Double Feature is about to begin!
Erik Mona
Publisher
August 2010
ERIK MONA is the publisher of Paizo Publishing, LLC, creators of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and the Planet Stories line of pulp fantasy novels. Mona has won more than a dozen major game industry awards and his writing has been published by Paizo, Wizards of the Coast, Green Ronin Publishing, and The MIT Press.
Sojan the Swordsman
Michael Moorcock
With special thanks to Graeme Talboys for his incredible feat, worthy of Sojan himself, in restoring this text to electronic form; and also for John Davey, as always an outstanding editor and astonishing friend, who resurrected the texts from their original appearances together with Jim Cawthorn’s illustrations.
Parts of this book originally appeared in Burroughsania (1954), Tarzan Adventures 1957-8, Savoy Books 1976, publishers Britton and Butterworth, who were the first to discover the stories, reprint a version of them and commission fresh illustrations from Jim Cawthorn. This is the first time the Introduction has been published.
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
Sojan the Swordsman was the first fantasy character I created, around 1954 or ’55 when I was fourteen or fifteen. He appeared in the first issue of my Ed
gar Rice Burroughs fanzine Burroughsania, which I sold at school for a penny. Later, when I was asked by the editor of the juvenile story paper Tarzan Adventures for something in the manner of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s fantasy stories, I remembered Sojan. These are the stories as originally conceived, warts and all, roughly as they appeared as serials in the magazine from 1957. They would all be published by my good friend Jim Cawthorn, who would work with me all my writing life until he died in November 2008. Jim’s illustrations are taken both from the magazine and the reprinted but unrestored stories commissioned by Savoy Books in 1977. This book is dedicated to Jim Cawthorn, who remained a mentor and an inspiration.
Michael Moorcock
Introduction
There is a story told across the many inhabited worlds of the universe about the fate of brave men and women where the pursuit of money and power is prized less than the pursuit of honour and self-respect.
They die noble deaths and are destined to be reborn over and over again on distant planets, often taking the place of another heroic person who has died in action . . . This is a form of reincarnation, the universe’s way of ensuring that some kind of balance is struck between those who are motivated by greed and those who work for the general good.
One such fighter was Sir John de Courcy, of an ancient line going back to the days of the Conquest on his father’s side and to a race of Irish warrior-statesmen on the other. The de Courcy family had served their country as soldiers since before Agincourt. They had given their blood, lives and treasure in selfless defence of all that was best in British history. Until the First World War they had commanded cavalry but now served in tank regiments. The current holder of the family title had commanded light, fast-moving vehicles in the North African desert against the cunning of Rommel, the infamous Desert Fox and later served with Montgomery in the European campaigns which had gradually pushed the Nazis back to Berlin. Now, once again side by side with his American allies, he was fighting in Korea against an enemy quite as single-minded as Hitler’s forces and quite as ready to crush individuals in the name of a “greater cause,” though this time they did not call themselves National Socialists but Communists.