{"id":43712,"date":"2020-11-18T05:53:22","date_gmt":"2020-11-18T02:53:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tentaclii.wordpress.com\/?p=43712"},"modified":"2022-04-24T21:58:35","modified_gmt":"2022-04-24T21:58:35","slug":"jack-londons-fantastic-tales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2020\/11\/18\/jack-londons-fantastic-tales\/","title":{"rendered":"Jack London’s Fantastic Tales"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sandy Ferber has a long and appreciative review of Jack London’s prehistoric work Before Adam<\/a><\/em> (1907), read in what sounds like a nice 2000 edition from Bison Books<\/a>. The review has many spoilers, but is also a fine summary if you’re not all that likely to read the book.<\/p>\n

As many pulp historians will know there was quite a crop of such stone-age books and stories during this period, and from many of the leading writers. Late in the day R.E. Howard broke into print with such a tale, “Spear and Fang”, and Lovecraft remarks that Howard was a perceptive admirer of Jack London. <\/p>\n

But melodramatic grunt n’ weep Stone Age tales have never been something that’s greatly appealed to me, and I guess I prefer a mix of the specific and a grand sweep of history. As such I’ve enjoyed Mithen’s non-fiction door-stopper After the Ice<\/em> and I find authentic “through the ages” re-creations of prehistoric life interesting in art. There’s a wealth of stamp and card-art of this type, most of it seemingly from inter-war Germany which had a large industry in quality colour-card printing, and which you can today find flowing through eBay…<\/p>\n

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Anyway, at the end of the review Ferber notes that…<\/p>\n

I see that Dover has also put out a book of Jack London\u2019s short stories dealing with the fantastic, entitled, uh, Fantastic Tales.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s actually from the University of Nebraska’s trade books imprint, Bison Books<\/a>, who also re-published Before Adam<\/em>. Turns out to be a limited edition from 1998 in their Bison Frontiers of Imagination<\/em> series. The hardback is nudging toward silly prices, but the paperback is still affordable<\/a> on Amazon though it doesn’t appear on the Bison website.<\/p>\n

I then discovered that Fantastic Tales<\/em> used to be titled Jack London’s tales of fantasy<\/em> (1975). As such it is now on Archive.org to borrow, alongside The Science Fiction of Jack London: an anthology<\/em>; and The Science Fiction Stories of Jack London<\/em>, all books with what looks like quite a bit of crossover in their contents. This non-doggie side of London’s work thus seems quite manageable, and I may well get around to it one day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sandy Ferber has a long and appreciative review of Jack London’s prehistoric work Before Adam (1907), read in what sounds …<\/p>\n

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