Dune Encyclopedia

26 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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I’m pleased to see there was a good encyclopaedia for Dune, back in the 1980s, Dune Encyclopedia. It was written as if ‘in-world’, and as such felt free to elaborate new ideas on the background and character back-stories. Today it can be understood as a possibly-correct history, with errors and misunderstandings made by some of the ‘historians’ involved. This is because Herbert himself later contradicted some of the elements in the Dune Encyclopedia, with his later Dune books.

Note that the new Dune Companion book from McFarland is apparently a stinker, and is to be avoided.

After a little digging and testing I find that the reading order for unabridged audiobook readers is:—

1. Book 1: Dune. The unabridged audiobook reading by George Guidall is the best one to listen to. Also, note that the Scott Brick audiobook version is apparently abridged for some reason.

2. Interlude: “The Road to Dune”. A quite short work by Herbert that sits between the first two novels, to be found in his short-story collection Eye. There appears to be no audiobook of this, so it would need to be read in ebook form. Said to take the form of “a guidebook for pilgrims to the planet Arrakis”. (Update: A Scott Brick / Audio Renaissance audiobook titled “The Road to Dune” was released in 2012 – some say 2005 – but apparently it does not actually contain “The Road to Dune”!).

3. Book 2. Dune Messiah. The unabridged audiobook reading by Scott Brick et al.

4. Book 3. Children of Dune. The unabridged audiobook reading by Scott Brick et al. is the most listen-able.

There is also a Book 4, God Emperor of Dune. It’s by Frank Herbert, rather than some later cash-in writer. But it is widely said to be a rather depressing and dour coda to the original trilogy. It also departs heavily from the style of the core trilogy. As such, you may well be happy with just the original trilogy.

Note that each of the three core books appears to have “Deleted Scenes & Chapters from…” fannish ebook floating around the Internet, which might be looked at after each novel. Some of these are in audio as part of “The Road to Dune” audiobook mentioned above.

“In my youth I was a veritable bicycle centaur” – H.P. Lovecraft.

25 Tuesday Sep 2018

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28th October 2018: “Tour de Tentacle”. 65 Weybosset Street, Providence. Booking now. Eastside Monthly reports…

Billed as ‘a weird bike odyssey in Providence’, this collaboration between the Lovecraft Arts & Sciences Council and Confluence Placemaking begins and ends at dusk at The Arcade [in Providence, Rhode Island] “for a dark cosmic reckoning.” Event organizers promise ‘tentacles and beer’, but note that this is BYOB as in [bring your own] bike.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as cosmic horror

25 Tuesday Sep 2018

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“Douglas Adams’s” Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” as a Representative of Cosmic Horror”, a new B.A. undergraduate dissertation, in English from Hungary. Online and public. At first glance it looks short for a final dissertation, but that’s a trick of the formatting — since it does run to 6,000 words. It puts forward an interesting claim that some of this blog’s readers might want to note…

Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker series is usually labelled as science fiction. [But] Adams abandons the traditional devices of science fiction and because he borrows from cosmic horror, it could be argued that the Hitchhiker series could be considered a representative of cosmic horror.

Listed as relevant factors are:

* “Cosmos as a threatening entity”.
* “Merciful ignorance”.
* “Merciful lack of self-knowledge”.
* “Irony – the effect and technique”.

Howard Days: recording of a panel on the Lovecraft – Howard letters

25 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Podcasts etc., REH, Scholarly works

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From 2015, a one-hour panel discussion by scholars of the two-volume A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.

Part of Ben Freiberg’s fine and seemingly comprehensive collection of recordings of the ‘Howard Days’ panels and speeches. ‘Howard Days’ look excellent and, as as I’m never likely to get to Texas, a big thanks to Ben for placing clear recordings online.

Tentaclii back at No. 1

24 Monday Sep 2018

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I’m pleased to see that Tentaclii is back at No. 1 in the Google Search results, for a simple search for lovecraft blog. Not that you’d know that if you were using Bing or even the DuckDuckGo search-engines. Bing seems to ‘black-hole’ Tentaclii, giving the blog a mere one result and nothing in the ‘last month’ filter. And that’s despite my submitting the blog URL when I re-started posting, just before they announced they were shutting down the Bing URL submission service. I can only assume that Microsoft’s bot runs an algorithm that says “Tentaclii = not a proper word, must be a spam-blog” without actually giving the content a sniff.

The Music of Harold Farnese

24 Monday Sep 2018

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts

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Harold S. Farnese didn’t write any stories, poems, or articles for Weird Tales, nor was he a cover artist or illustrator. His eight letters published in “The Eyrie,” the letters column of Weird Tales, failed to land him in the top twenty contributors in that category. [Yet he] may have been the first person to adapt a work by H.P. Lovecraft to a form other than verse or prose.

Harold S. Farnese, Part One.

Harold S. Farnese, Part Two.

Harold S. Farnese, Part Three.

Harold S. Farnese, Part Four.

Harold S. Farnese, Part Five.

Harold S. Farnese, Part Six (final part).

From Tellers of Weird Tales. See also his post on “The Lovecraft-Farnese Correspondence” with a new timeline.

“Robert E. Howard, Bran Mak Morn and The Picts”

24 Monday Sep 2018

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A curious thing, but welcome. A 54-minute reading of a scholarly essay, in an audiobook style more suited to reading Conan. The essay is by Rusty Burke and Patrice Louinet, “Robert E. Howard, Bran Mak Morn and The Picts”, and it appears to have been recorded because it was part of the Howard collection Bran Mac Morn: The Last King, Del Rey, 2005. Now on YouTube. Backup: Mirror.

Genuine Pictish or Irish brooch, circa 800 A.D. Note the ‘winged ones’ perched around the edge of the design which circles the amber stones…

Shadows Over Baker Street – the worthy stories

23 Sunday Sep 2018

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Which stories might I want to read in Shadows Over Baker Street, the well-known Sherlock Holmes-Lovecraft mash-up anthology? I rarely glance at such anthologies and, even when I do, I’m not someone who slogs through all stories. Roll on the day we get ‘the Spotify for stories’ and can do our own remix anthologies. In the meantime I just want the best in any given anthology or collection, and am prepared to do 30 minutes of research to find out which stories are deemed the best.

Nor do I care for ‘sidelong stories’, of the sort that often pad anthologies by strapping a minor character into some tangentially connected setting. For instance, Shadows Over Baker Street has a reportedly good story featuring Sebastian Moran on a tiger-hunt in India. But neither the setting or the minor character appeals to me. I don’t read Sherlock Holmes stories for their jungle settings.

Let’s see what the reviews say about the book:—

Baker St. Dozen has a biting review from a sceptical Sherlockian perspective. They only strongly commend the following stories, which use the expected setting and approach:

* Steven Elliott-Altman, “A Case of Royal Blood”.
* Brian Stableford, “Art in the Blood”.

Kirkus has its usual snippy review, though this one is less cutting than usual. They note:

* Neil Gaiman, “A Study in Emerald”.
* Brian Stableford, “Art in the Blood”.
* F. Gwynplaine McIntyre, “The Adventure of Exham Priory”.

The latter is singled out by Kirkus as a “stunning” and “ingenious reworking of the familiar incident of Holmes’s misadventure at the Reichenbach Falls”. An Amazon review also claims it to be darkly comic, if one reads it in the right way.

The Harrow Review has:

* Neil Gaiman, “A Study in Emerald”.
* Steven-Elliot Altman, “A Case of Royal Blood”.
* James Lowder, “The Weeping Masks”.

Innsmouth Free Press singled out:

* Neil Gaiman, “A Study in Emerald”.
* F. Gwynplaine McIntyre, “The Adventure of Exham Priory”.

Note that several of the more fannish reviewers, who I also consulted, also disliked Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald”. Apparently for its too-whimsical approach. You either love it or hate it, it seems. My own reaction to it takes the form of a short Holmes pastiche story “The Case of the Purloined Prose”.

I then skittered over the Amazon reviews, but failed to spot claims for as-yet un-noticed gems in the collection. F. Gwynplaine Macintyre’s “The Adventure of Exham Priory” did have another bit of acclaim in one such review.

Thus, for those who don’t want to slog through all 480 pages of what is widely regarded as a very patchy collection, Shadows Over Baker Street appears to boil down to…

* Neil Gaiman, “A Study in Emerald”.
* Steven-Elliot Altman, “A Case of Royal Blood”.
* Brian Stableford, “Art in the Blood”.
* James Lowder, “The Weeping Masks”.
* F. Gwynplaine McIntyre, “The Adventure of Exham Priory”.
* Simon Clarke’s “Nightmare in Wax” – this ends the volume, and does get occasional tepid mentions in the reviews.

Only half a dozen. Still, the book is now on Kindle for just 99 pence (about $1.30). Even just for a handful of such crossover stories, that’s not a bad price.

Finally, talking of Cthulhu and Sherlock, avoid this new book series like the plague. Great covers, but bloody awful books from both a Lovecraftian and Sherlockian perspective. And just plain bad writing too.