I’ll use my +4 mace to take out the Ork 2 Damage 2 Damage. Ah, the fantasy realm – the bane of some of our youths. We all read this type of stuff growing up. I was more of a sci-fi geek but that comes next week (wink). This time out, we’re going to don our mystical robes, pointed hats and 12-sided die, and show the kids there was fantasy long before a little kid with a lightning-bolt scar on his head.
SLAVES OF SLEEP by L. Ron Hubbard – Since we can’t go a month without mentioning our favorite book of the year, THE CHINATOWN DEATH CLOUD PERIL, I figured it was finally time to cover a book from one of that book’s real-life characters. To be honest, I just dont see the apeal of Hubbard’s writing at all. It’s low-rent pulp at best. And it doesn’t help when Hubbard confuses things by switching the characters’ names around as he does in this 1939 work.
The story deals with a bit of a dweeb who opens a jar with a genie in it. The genie – or Ifrit, as he is called – is so pissed off having to live in the jar that he kills one Professor Frobish, leaving said dweeb Jan to take the blame. Then the genie curses Jan to a life without sleep. What this means is every time Jan tries to sleep, he wakes on some fantastical world where he is some Conan type. For anyone who has seen the movie HEAVY METAL, you can see they borrowed liberally from this book.
So SLAVES OF SLEEP switches between the real life of Jan trying to prove his innocence in jail, while his other half, “Tiger,” goes in search of this Ifrit to free him from this curse. It’s short, it’s confusing and it tries to tie up everything in an epliogue. If this is the type of stuff that hooked Travolta and Cruise to give countless dollars and blind loyalty to Scientology, then P.T. Barnum was so right.
THE LOST CITY OF ZORK by Robin W. Bailey – Kids, let me tell you of a time when games needed more than a controller and super-snazzy graphics. You actually had to use something most games of today don’t require: a brain. I’m talking the glory days of INFOCOM games, with their flagship text adventure being the ZORK series. Having played countless games from that company, I grabbed this 1991 book years ago, always wanting to check out fiction based on the series.
Let’s be honest: This title is for the fans, plain and simple. It’s filled with so many little in-jokes about the game, you’ll lose count. The story is pretty much a parody of the adventure/fantasy realm, with no pun left untouched. We’re introduced to Caspar, a farmer who is captured and thrown into a galley of a ship. Caspar escapes the boat, thanks to a none-too-great wizard named Satchmoz and a would-be thief deemed Sunrise. The book follows their travels, leading to a castle with a sleeping princess, then to the magic guild where it looks like all the wizards are missing.
Tolkien this is not; it’s meant to be light and fun and nothing else. It delievers on all counts and makes for a nice change of pace compared to all the other stuff normally covered here. So if you’ve got fond memories of buying those super-cool-packaged games, grab the text adventure you actually can hold in your hand.
BRAK THE BARBARIAN by John Jakes – Robert E. Howard has a lot to answer for. Without the late, great Howard’s creations, we would not have to endure the sub-Conan-type writing we have here.
This 1968 book is a total Conan rip-off. i know Brak has his fans, but wow, is this series a stinker. I thought the book was going to be one long adventure, but what we get are a few short stories with no character development and plenty of confusing plots. No matter what story you read, you’re guaranteed the women in it will probably be evil or work for some nameless god.
The only saving grace is the van-worthy artwork on the cover. BRAK reads like a bad Dungeons & Dragons scenario. It’s books like this one that remind me why I don’t read that much sword-and-sorcery stuff anymore. I’ll just stick with Howard’s output of barbarians, kings and Puritans.
Next time: I Was a Teenage Sci-Fi Geek! –Bruce Grossman
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