STEVE CARROLL WRITES

I recently found myself sucked into the limited television series,  The Offer, which details the behind the scenes trials and tribulations involved with producing the motion picture adaptation of Mario Puzo’s hugely successful novel,  The Godfather . I was sufficiently intrigued to re-watch all three of Francis Ford Coppola’s highly regarded and Academy Award-winning films based on the book and its characters. I have always been a huge fan of the films (especially those flawless first two) but this recent viewing, along with the knowledge of what was involved in making the first one, spurred me on to pull the original book down from my shelves and finally read it for the first time ever. Originally published in 1969,  The Godfather  was a juggernaut, remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for 67 weeks and selling over nine million copies in only two years. It transpires over the cour...

Red Sonja began life as a comic book, the creation of writer Roy Thomas and artist Barry Windsor-Smith in 1973 for Marvel’s popular  Conan series. She was partially based on a character created by Conan author Robert E. Howard,  Red Sonya of Rogatino . However, it was the Marvel Comics version that captured the imagination of young boys in the 70s with her voluptuous curves wrapped in a chain mail bikini, her sword fighting skills, and her take-no-prisoners kick-ass attitude. She finally made the leap to novels in 1981 through the combined efforts of established fantasy authors David C. Smith and Richard L. Tierney.  The first book in a 6-book series,  The Ring of Ikribu , even had its prologue written by Roy Thomas, giving it his personal blessing as a proper extension of his character. What follows is a reasonably straightforward sword and sorcery adventure tale with the twist that its sword-wiel...

I   have been aware of the tales of Fritz Leiber’s towering barbarian Fafhrd and   his diminutive companion, the thief known as The Gray Mouser, since my   earliest   flirtations with the Sword and Sorcery genre going back into my mid-teens. For   whatever reason though, I never read them back then, opting   instead for Robert   E. Howard’s Conan stories and their many (and typically inferior) pastiche   imitators. In retrospect, I am glad that is the case, as I never   would have   appreciated these stories as a teenager as much as I do now as a seasoned adult   reader.  My first foray into the tales of Lankhmar—the   mythical land where the   stories transpire—comes courtesy of the fourth collection of adventures,  Swords Against Wizardry . These three   stories and one   novella all feature a world-weary, lived-in quality that makes   Lankhmar seem quite tangible. Supernatural elements and magic...