{"id":31023,"date":"2019-09-04T05:53:37","date_gmt":"2019-09-04T02:53:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tentaclii.wordpress.com\/?p=31023"},"modified":"2022-12-03T06:43:23","modified_gmt":"2022-12-03T06:43:23","slug":"getting-started-with-ardath-mayhar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2019\/09\/04\/getting-started-with-ardath-mayhar\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting started with Ardath Mayhar"},"content":{"rendered":"

Where does one start when faced with the vast output of the East Texas writer Ardath Mayhar<\/a>? Even the intro to her main Megapack<\/em> Kindle ebook doesn’t provide a quick overview survey and guide. According to the Women SF Writers of the 1970s<\/a> pages at Tor, she doesn’t even exist. But after a bit of searching and jiggling of Wikipedia I think I now have it roughly worked out…<\/p>\n

Audiobook:<\/strong> Crazy Quilt: The Best Short Stories of Ardath Mayhar<\/em>. I can’t get the table-of-contents for this in any format. Also in paper, but no ebook.<\/p>\n

Rural weird\/dark:<\/strong> Strange Doin’s in the Pine Hills: Stories of Fantasy and Mystery in East Texas<\/em>, and A World of Weirdities: Tales to Shiver<\/em>. The first is in Kindle ebook and is dark rather than weird, and the latter is in collectable paper with 29 stories, “many of them never before published”.<\/p>\n

Other starter fiction:<\/strong><\/p>\n

i) As a starting point for her fantasy, How the Gods Wove in Kyrannon<\/em> (1979) seems to be the best. It was her first such book, a set of tightly linked brief and delicately-Dunsanian stories followed by culminating sections. Its world-setting appears to have later been spun off as a three-volume series under the name Lords of the Triple Moon<\/em> with these being aimed at a slightly younger audience than the first book? All are in Kindle ebook.<\/p>\n

ii) The Ardath Mayhar MegaPack<\/em> in two $2 Kindle books of stories. The first seeming to have the best and lighter stories in it, the second some darker material. I’m uncertain if these two collections form ‘the complete short fiction’ or are just a partial selection from her vast output. They seem to present the stories in no particular order, and include a number of westerns.<\/p>\n

iii) Messengers in White<\/em> sounds like the most interesting and successful of her science-fiction novels to start with. It’s available in Kindle ebook.<\/p>\n

iv) Her ‘what happens when we make intelligent monkeys?’ novels sound perhaps-fun, but is probably not the science-fiction work to start with. These are found as Monkey Station: The Macaque Cycle, Book One<\/em> and Trail of the Seahawks: The Macaque Cycle, Book Two<\/em>, and both are in Kindle ebook. There was talk of a videogame, but I’ve found no evidence of a book three? Difficult to tell much more about it without proper reviews. It’s very difficult to find reviews for her work that are not flippant and cynical, and one gets the feeling that — like Clifford Simak — her robust rural Texan conservatism and blending of fantasy\/sci-fi didn’t sit well with the sci-fi establishment of the 1980s and 1990s. (“Conservatism” doesn’t here = evangelical or religious, and a Starlog<\/em> interview reveals that she was hounded locally by deluded Christians during the bizarre moral-panics over ‘Satanism’ in the 90s. Even today I encountered one prissy Christian on Amazon reviews, squeaking over discovering that Mayhar’s regionalist East Texas novels had dared to offer a tepid view of her local Church-goers).<\/p>\n

Regionalist:<\/strong> So yes, there’s also a whole bundle of East Texas local rural novels and stories. Mostly ‘young adult’ tales with feisty heroines, though there’s also what is apparently her survivalist adult-novel masterpiece The World Ends in Hickory Hollow<\/em>. I had my fill of that kind of post-apocalyptic novel in the 1980s, and I’m not sure I want more even now, but it’s well regarded.<\/p>\n

Westerns:<\/strong> There are a great many robust pre-PC wild-western novels which might appeal to R.E. Howard fans. I’ve no idea were one might start with these.<\/p>\n

Advice:<\/strong> Through a Stone Wall: Lessons from Thirty Years of Writing<\/em>. Paper only. Seems to be well-regarded.<\/p>\n

Autobiography<\/strong>: Strange View from a Skewed Orbit: An Oddball Memoir<\/em>. Paper only. Said to be excellent.<\/p>\n

Most of her books appear to be quite short by modern standards, many well under 200 pages. One associates the late 1980s and 90s with over-padded door-stopper books, especially in fantasy, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.<\/p>\n

So, that’s my somewhat hazy outline based on some online research scrabbling among scattered and sparse materials. Any advice or correction is welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Where does one start when faced with the vast output of the East Texas writer Ardath Mayhar? Even the intro …<\/p>\n

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