Appendix N Book Club
71 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 4 years ago - ★★★★★ - 57 ratingsJeff Goad, Ngo Vinh-Hoi, and a rotating roster of special guests discuss the classic adventure, fantasy, horror, science fiction, and weird fiction that inspired the creation of the world's first roleplaying game.
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Episodes
Episode 20 - A. Merritt's "Burn Witch, Burn!" with special guest Stephen Newton
January 08, 2018 13:36 - 52 minutes - 56.8 MBAbraham Grace Merritt (better known by his byline A. Merritt) has the odd distinction of being perhaps second only to Edgar Rice Burroughs in popularity as a writer of fantastic fiction during the first half of the 20th century, only to be largely forgotten today. Perhaps this is because Merritt’s relatively small body of work didn’t feature recurring iconic heroes like John Carter of Mars or Conan of Cimmeria, or it may be down to his prose style’s reputation for being more baroque and dense...
Episode 19 - Jack Vance's "The Eyes of the Overworld" with special guest David Hoskins
December 25, 2017 15:57 - 59 minutes - 60.2 MBThe Eyes of the Overworld (Ace Books, 1966) marks Jack Vance’s return to the Dying Earth setting after a break of 15 years. The book is a fix-up of the stories “The Overworld”, “The Mountains of Magnatz”, “The Sorceror Pharesm”, “The Pilgrims” and “The Manse of Iucounu” all of which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction between December 1965 and August 1966. To these stories Vance added a second chapter “Cil” to expand the book to novel length. The Eyes of the Overworld is con...
Episode 18 - Fritz Leiber's "Swords Against Death" with special guest Jen Brinkman
December 18, 2017 17:36 - 56 minutes - 58.5 MBSwords Against Death (Ace Books, 1970) by Fritz Leiber was originally published in paperback as part of Ace Books’ complete seven volume saga of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Although Swords Against Death is second in the series chronology, it was actually the fifth book published. The stories is this volume are “The Circle Curse” (1970), “The Jewels in the Forest” (1939), “Thieves’ House” (1943), “The Bleak Shore” (1940), “The Howling Tower” (1941), “The Sunken Land” (1942), “The Seven Black ...
Episode 17 - Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, & Lin Carter’s “Conan of Cimmeria”
December 04, 2017 15:22 - 56 minutes - 51 MBConan of Cimmeria (Lancer Books, 1969) by Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, and Lin Carter was part of first comprehensive paperback edition of the Conan saga. Conan of Cimmeria was the seventh volume published, although it is second in the internal chronology--later printings of the series numbered the books in chronological order. When Lancer when out of business in 1973, Ace Books picked up and completed the series, keeping it in print until the mid 1990s. As with Conan, series edito...
Episode 16 - L. Sprague de Camp's "Lest Darkness Fall"
November 27, 2017 16:04 - 59 minutes - 56.3 MBL. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall first saw light as a short story in the December 1939 issue of Unknown magazine before being expanded into a full novel for hardcover publication by Henry Holt & Company in 1941. Unknown was the companion magazine to Astounding, both of which were edited by John W. Campbell, the godfather of the “Golden Age of Science Fiction”. Campbell had taken the reins of Astounding in 1937 and had almost immediately turned it away from its freewheeling high adventu...
Episode 15 - Lin Carter's "Giant of World's End"
November 20, 2017 18:54 - 56 minutes - 54.5 MBLin Carter has a multi-faceted reputation in the world of fantastic fiction. As an editor and critic, he is virtually indispensable, most notably for his role in editing the landmark Ballantine Adult Fantasy series (BAFS), as well as the subsequent Flashing Swords!, The Year's Best Fantasy, and Weird Tales anthologies. Carter’s legacy as a writer is considerably more muddied by his “posthumous collaborations” with Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, which often consisted of creating enti...
Episode 14 - Sterling E. Lanier's "Hiero's Journey"
November 13, 2017 18:35 - 58 minutes - 53.5 MBThere’s surprisingly little reliable biographical information about Sterling E. Lanier, but like many Appendix N authors he does seem to have been a man of many parts. Most accounts of Lanier’s life have him studying archaeology and anthropology at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania before working as a researcher and historian for most of the 1950s. His other interests included sculpture, natural history, and cryptozoology, all of which would bear on his creative endeavors. In 1961 L...
Episode 13 - Gardner F. Fox's "Kothar: Barbarian Swordsman"
November 06, 2017 22:39 - 53 minutes - 49.3 MBJ.R.R. Tolkien and perhaps Robert E. Howard aside, no Appendix N author has had as a large a pop culture footprint as Gardner F. Fox, but not for any of the works cited by Gary Gygax. Although hardly a household name today, Gardner Fox was among other things one of the most prolific comic book writers of the 20th Century. Fox was originally a practicing attorney in New York City, but still must have found it hard to make ends meet during the heart of the Great Depression--in 1937 he began wri...
Episode 12 - Michael Moorcock's "The Stealer of Souls"
October 30, 2017 17:42 - 55 minutes - 50.4 MBMichael Moorcock’s first five Elric of Melniboné stories appeared in the British magazine Science Fantasy in 1962 and were collected in hardcover the next year as The Stealer of Souls, followed by a U.S. paperback edition from Lancer Books in 1967. Savage and sardonic, the Elric stories must have seemed like a fantasy off-shoot of Great Britain’s “Angry Young Man” movement of that era. At first glance, Elric of Melniboné appears to be the very antithesis of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimme...
Episode 11 - John Bellairs's "The Face in the Frost"
October 16, 2017 23:28 - 52 minutes - 48.2 MBAt first glance John Bellairs’s The Face in the Frost is a bit of an anomaly, both in his own body of work and in Appendix N. It is the only Bellairs work cited by Gary Gygax in Appendix N, and ended up being Bellairs’s first and only fantasy novel directed at adults. Bellairs began work on The Face in the Frost in the late 1960s after reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. He created his protagonist Prospero as a reaction to the might and nobility of Gandalf, rendering Prospero and ...
Episode 10 - Roger Zelazny's "Jack of Shadows"
October 02, 2017 15:54 - 55 minutes - 51 MBRoger Zelazny stated that he wrote Jack of Shadows as a “first draft, no rewrite”, which might account for the occasionally elliptical nature of the narrative. Any lack of cohesion in the plotting is compensated for by the dark majesty of Jack AKA Shadowjack’s world. Zelazny is clearly echoing Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories here, at least in the weirdness of the creatures and landscapes of the darkside if not in the playful ornateness of Vance’s prose. Jack of Shadows also emphasizes the in...
Episode 9 - Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions
September 25, 2017 17:55 - 55 minutes - 51.2 MBPoul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions was originally serialized in 1953 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction--eight years later a revised and expanded version of the tale would see print in hardcover from Doubleday, followed by an Avon paperback in 1962. It has remained sporadically in print ever since, largely overshadowed by Anderson’s more famous science fiction works. Although Anderson was best known during the first half of his writing career as a science fiction author...
Episode 8 - Philip José Farmer's "The Maker of Universes"
September 18, 2017 16:51 - 54 minutes - 50.1 MBIn retrospect, the publication of Philip José Farmer’s The Maker of Universes (Ace Books, 1965) marks the beginning of the most productive and rewarding phase of Farmer’s writing career. It can hardly have seemed that way at the time, as Farmer was toiling away as a technical writer in Scottsdale, Arizona to support himself and his family. Even though Farmer had been a published writer as of 1946 and had even won his first Hugo Award in 1953 (as “Best New SF Author or Artist”), commercial suc...
Episode 7 – Fletcher Pratt's "The Blue Star"
September 04, 2017 13:11 - 47 minutes - 43.2 MBFletcher Pratt’s The Blue Star first saw print in the hardcover anthology Witches Three (Twayne Publishers, 1952), which also included Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife and James Blish’s “There Shall be No Darkness”. Pratt himself was the uncredited editor of the Witches Three, which ended up being the second and final volume in the short-lived “Twayne Triplets” series of themed hardcover fantastic fiction anthologies. Witches Three and The Blue Star in particular were positively reviewed at the ti...
Episode 6 – Edgar Rice Burroughs' "At the Earth's Core"
August 21, 2017 21:00 - 53 minutes - 98 MBEdgar Rice Burroughs’ first Pellucidar book At the Earth’s Core was part of the supernova period at the beginning of his writing career, wherein he managed to write 25 novels between 1911-1915! The serialization of At the Earth’s Core in All-Story Weekly magazine in 1914 represents the extraordinary feat of launching three major literary franchises in a mere three years, following on the Mars/Barsoom series and the Tarzan series. Pellucidar's Hollow Earth setting with its weird timeless etern...
Episode 5 – J.R.R. Tolkien's “The Hobbit"
August 07, 2017 13:12 - 52 minutes - 96.6 MBThe Hobbit first came to Oxford University professor J.R.R. Tolkien when he was grading papers in the early 1930s. Coming upon a blank page in an exam book, he suddenly wrote “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Tolkien worked on The Hobbit for the next several years before submitting it for publication in 1936 as a children’s book to George Allen & Unwin, then known mainly as an academic publishing house. The publisher Stanley Unwin paid his ten-year-old son Rayner a shilling to r...
Episode 4 - Jack Vance's "The Dying Earth" with special guest Gavin Norman
July 31, 2017 15:04 - 59 minutes - 110 MBSpecial guest Gavin Norman (author of The Complete Vivimancer and Theorems & Thaumaturgy) joins us to discuss Jack Vance‘s The Dying Earth! Jack Vance originally wrote the loosely connected stories that comprise The Dying Earth while serving in the United States Merchant Marine during World War II. Vance’s fiction had started appearing in pulp magazines as early as 1945, and The Dying Earth marked his first book publication when it was released in digest-sized paperback in 1950 by Hillman Pe...
Episode 3 - Fritz Leiber's "Swords and Deviltry"
July 24, 2017 03:23 - 52 minutes - 96 MBSwords and Deviltry (Ace Books, 1970) by Fritz Leiber was originally published in paperback as part of Ace Books’ complete seven volume saga of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Although Swords and Deviltry is first in the series chronology, it was actually the fourth book published. Leiber and his lifelong friend Harry Otto Fischer created Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in an exchange of letters in 1934, basing the pair loosely on their own friendship, with Fischer as the diminutive Mouser and Leibe...
Episode 2 – Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, & Lin Carter's "Conan"
July 14, 2017 13:59 - 55 minutes - 102 MBConan (Lancer Books, 1967) by Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, and Lin Carter was part of first comprehensive paperback edition of the Conan saga. Conan was the fifth volume published, although it is first in the internal chronology--later printings of the series numbered the books in chronological order. When Lancer when out of business in 1973, Ace Books picked up and completed the series, keeping it in print until the mid 1990s. In a now controversial move, series editors de Camp and...
Episode 1 - L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt's "The Compleat Enchanter"
July 04, 2017 05:04 - 52 minutes - 96.7 MBThe Compleat Enchanter by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt is a compilation of the first three novellas in the Harold Shea/Enchanter series, “The Roaring Trumpet” (1940), “The Mathematics of Magic” (1940), and “The Castle of Iron” (1941, revised 1950). The Compleat Enchanter was first published as a Nelson Doubleday/Science Fiction Book Club hardcover in 1975 before being released as a Del Rey paperback in 1976, featuring a charming Brothers Hildebrandt cover painting. The three adventu...
Episode 0 - The Appendix N (and why we care)
June 29, 2017 19:30 - 30 minutes - 56.5 MBHoi and Jeff explain what the Appendix N is and why they care.