“They called me [Hell’s Legionnaire] in the company. They couldn’t understand why I never had anything to do with women or liquor. They thought the devil was saving me for same vast purpose.”

Best known for being the king grifter of a genre known for its rats, L. Ron Hubbard’s literary career is overshadowed by his involvement with Scientology. Perhaps the casual reader might recall Battlefield: Earth or another of his science fiction tales. But Hubbard wrote fifteen million words in over 200 publications under 16 different names. Like many of his contemporaries in the pulps, Hubbard did not limit himself to one genre. Although science fiction would later define him, Hubbard wrote air adventures, sea adventures, Westerns, chinoiserie, and mysteries. But it’s to the once-popular Foreign Legion stories we turn to today, with Hubbard’s “Hell’s Legionnaire”, originally published in July 1935’s Mystery Adventures.

“Hell’s Legionnaire” begins in the thick of an ambush. In classic pulp fashion, Hubbard assumes readers are familiar with the brass and tack of the period and spares no time in the action to bring new readers up to speed on legionnaire jargon. Grab a dictionary or the glossary modern editors have appended to the end of the collection. Context alone is not always enough. After the dying is over, Ann is looted by the raiders.

What follows next might better fit the spicies and the weird menace genres. Ann is stripped then lashed by her captor, Abd el Malek, and is only saved from rape by the bugle of the French Legion. Or rather, a single deserter, Dusty Colton. Colton ambushes the camp with his automatic rifle, then frees Ann. But tickets back to America cost money, so Colton and Ann hatch a scheme to steal Abd el Malek’s fortune. Read More

Discover interstellar cops, cyberpunk agents, and vengeance-driven chi cultivators in this week’s new releases.

Alliance Rising (The Star Guild Saga #3) – Brandon Ellis

The aliens want her dead. Easier said than done.

Ali, archaeologist and expert at cuneiform translation, knows about the long-departed Anunnaki slavers, not just because of the ancient writings she has found in Mesopotamia, but because she has their blood running through her veins.

Now Ali’s found a terrifying truth:

The Anunnaki are coming back.

The powers afforded by Ali’s dangerous mixed blood make it just conceivable she can stop them… once she hooks up with the Space Templars.

Oh, and they have to fix a little problem: the Anunnaki left behind portals all around the Earth through which they can pour millions of troops in a matter of minutes.

So the race is on:

Can Ali kill the portals before the Anunnaki kill her?

Edenet (Singularity Sunrise #1) – Kit Sun Cheah

The 22nd century brings an era of technological wonders—and horrors. Cybernetics and genetic engineering. Mass surveillance and social credit. Full body cyborgs and nanoscale engineering. And the pinnacle of human achievement: machine intelligence.

Edenet is the next generation of the Internet. Designed by Anatol Corporation, it will bring the power of a supercomputer to the fingertips of every user, anywhere in the world. At the heart of Edenet lies a cutting-edge artificial intelligence that regulates all traffic on the network.

And one of its lead scientists has disappeared.

Fearing the worst, Anatol hires psychic contractor James Morgan to track her down. Accompanying him is Eligia Ogrod, the mysterious assistant to Anatol’s CEO. Their investigation takes them through the militarized streets of Warsaw, a corporate fortress in Shenzhen, and the human hives of Hong Kong.

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And what is the truth behind Edenet?

The Elements (Silver Coin Saga Book 1) – Mark Stallings

Death comes with the Harvest. Salvation lies in the Valley of the Moon, along the path of Martial Magic.

Xan always assumed he would be apprenticed to an herbalist in the sleepy village of Mogu and follow the Path of Peace, just like his father before him. It is the way—has always been the way.

But when his village is sacked by a raiding force of vicious monsters, corrupted by dark Qi, life as Xan knows it is over. Family dead. Villagers slain. His home burnt to ash.

Now, all Xan wants to do is figure out why his people were targeted and get revenge on the merciless creatures sweeping across the continent like a plague of locusts. Spreading their vile corruption. His only hope at salvation and retribution lies in the Valley of the Moon, at the fabled Xing Yi School of Martial Magic. If he is to succeed, he will need to learn to cultivate the energy of the elements, hone his martial and crafting skills, and complete the school’s harsh tests and trials. It will take more than a passing grade at this school, though, and not all that fail survive the experience…

Memetic Drift (Sol Arbiter #4) – J. N. Chaney and Jia Shen

“They call us Arbiters. We arbitrate conflict to keep the peace.”

In 2853, humanity has established a presence across the solar system. Linked by a network of FTL gateways called Boson Apertures, travel between the 7 colonized worlds and thousands of space colonies takes only hours.

The Sol Federation is the final authority, and the Arbiters travel the system to maintain order.

In 2854, Section 9 uncovers the location of an illegal technology that could unmask a member of The Eleven, their mysterious enemy. Tycho Barrett is grievously wounded during a mission to seize this technology from aboard a ship docked in a remote settlement on Europa, his life saved with cutting-edge cybernetic augmentation.

Tycho and Section 9 must now race against both time and a revenant from the past to recapture the ship and its cargo before the trail vanishes and The Eleven once again return to the shadows. Read More

With the recent publishing of Mortu and Kyrus stories in 电脑上搭梯子 and The Penultimate Men, let us revisit the first, “Mortu and Kyrus in the White City.”

Read More

Uncover professional wizards, generation colony ships, heroes from another world, and buried alien starships in this week’s new releases.

Dragontiarna: Defenders – Jonathan Moeller

The realm of Andomhaim reels beneath the invasion of Warlord Agravhask, and Ridmark stands in his path.

Ridmark knows that Agravhask is only the servant of the mighty Warden of Urd Morlemoch, and the realm must be ready to face its true foe.

But the Warden knows that Ridmark can stop him, and has dispatched the Heralds of Ruin to slay the Shield Knight.

Third of Nightmane Forest has seen the trap, and rushes to save her friend.

If she fails, the Warden and his dark Heralds will triumph, and darkness will swallow the world…

Entropy (Forgotten Starship #3) – M. R. Forbes

The generation starship Pioneer continues her centuries-long journey across the vastness of space. Joseph has returned to hibernation. The passengers are safe.

For now.

When the ship suffers an unexpected malfunction, Preslan is brought in to help identify the source. Joining Tyson on the bridge, it isn’t long before they determine there’s more to the anomaly than meets the eye.

Much, much more.

Not only is the ship off-course and headed into the middle of an ancient intergalactic war, but their best defense against the looming danger is the same thing that’s forcing them into it.

The stakes are higher, the odds are greater and time is running out. If they can’t escape the impending chaos, it won’t only be the passengers and crew of Pioneer that are lost…

…it’ll be the entire human race.

Peace Talks (Dresden Files #16) – Jim Butcher

As a professional wizard, Harry Dresden knows firsthand that the “everyday” world is actually full of strange and magical things—and most of them don’t play well with humans. And those that do enjoy playing with humans far too much. He also knows he’s the best at what he does. Technically, he’s the only at what he does. But even though Harry is the only game in town, business—to put it mildly—stinks.

When the Supernatural nations of the world meet up to negotiate an end to ongoing hostilities, Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only professional wizard, joins the White Council’s security team to make sure the talks stay civil. But can he succeed, when dark political manipulations threaten the very existence of Chicago—and all he holds dear?

Pearl (Murphy’s Lawless #5) – Mark Wandrey and Charles E. Gannon

Taken from their planet and their century, they are…the Lost Soldiers.

Some of the hijacked Twentieth Century troops known as the Lost Soldiers have made planetfall on R’Bak and are working to establish their base there, but their commander, Major Murphy, has a problem. He knows there are weapons and equipment caches that haven’t been activated yet by their immediate enemies—the Satraps—although they are moving as quickly as they can to get to the caches so they can turn those weapons upon their new off-world foes.

Victor Allen Thomas—“Vat” to his friends—was escaping an arms deal gone bad when the helicopter carrying him crashed and he was hijacked by the mysterious Ktor. While he had military experience, he had left the military years before under suspicious circumstances. With a general discharge in his past, he shouldn’t even have been in Somalia to begin with.

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But Vat has never been good at forming relationships. He’s going to have to overcome that failing, because there are only two possible outcomes for his mission. Either he finds the pearls of great price that will allow the Terrans to securely establish themselves on R’Bak, or—if he doesn’t—the future of Murphy’s Lawless isn’t merely bleak; it’s likely to be nonexistent. Read More

First published in The Howard Collector, Spring 1967, VPS 搭梯子指南——shadowsocks+BBR+obfs | Solarck:玩电脑 (current) 关于我 简历 VPS 搭梯子指南——shadowsocks+ BBR +obfs 近期开会导致墙越来越高，迫不得已升级自建的 ss 服务，由于 shadowsocks 原版已经停更，shadowsocksR 也已经删库，所以就 …, by Robert E. Howard, resembles a prose poem in the same vein as Clark Ashton Smith’s “Chinoiserie”. While there is a narrative thread throughout the short story, it does not, at first glance, map to conventional dramatic structure. The three sections, “The Curse of the Golden Skull”, “The Emerald Interlude”, and “The Orchids of Death” obscure the structure.

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Rotath spends his dying moment cursing the gods that allowed him to die. As their dark servants come for him, this sorcerer casts one last desperate and spiteful spell that changes his body, one that he hopes will wreak havoc across the ages.

In the “Emerald Interlude”, the ages pass:

Years stretched into centuries, centuries became ages. The green oceans rose and wrote an epic poem in emerald and the rhythm thereof was terrible. Thrones toppled and silver trumpets fell silent forever. The races of men passed as smoke drifts from the breast of a summer. The roaring jade green seas engulfed the lands and all mountains sank, even the highest mountain of Lemuria.

That’s the entire interlude, a descriptive section filled with as much tumult and cataclysmic action as can be fit into 64 words. And, in its way, it’s emblematic of the entire “The Curse of the Golden Skull”. Howard comes out swinging with his descriptions and fills the story with the struggle of the fight. The Jeffro Johnson test for covers (have people busy with action instead of standing around looking cool) applies here. And this is just the contemplative section denoting that the time is passing.

The final section, “The Orchids of Death”, picks up with an unnamed adventurer discovering the skull and skeleton of gold:

What long dead artisan had shaped the thing with such incredible skill? He bent closer, noting the rounded ball-and-socket of the joints, the slight depressions on flat surfaces where muscles had been attached. And he started as the stupendous truth was borne upon him.

The adventurer, of course, is doomed. But is it from the curse or from natural causes? Like most short stories of the era, it all hinges on a twist at the end, a terrible denouement that alters everything that has come before.

The sections and the uneven lengths obscure the dramatic structure present.  The first line immediately thrusts a problem upon Rotath. 600 words in, almost the exact center of the story, Rotath attempts his spiteful defiance, the turning point for the story. And in the last lines, we learn whether or not his dying action succeeded. This follows the conventional five-act dramatic structure, albeit with an abbreviated introduction and denouement, and without acts. And Howard’s conflict-filled prose is well suited for drama, even if ages fly past in mere lines.

“The Curse of the Golden Skull” was a happy little discovery nestled deep in the lines of a search engine. As such, it is a delightfully harrowing read that rewards the critical eye’s scrutiny. For, like a good house, the construction is as sound as the facade is beautiful.