Lacking Natural Simplicity

Echoes of Valor II by Karl Edward Wagner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Another excellent collection of heroic fantasy edited by Karl Edward Wagner. I think I had read all the fiction before, by Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore, (with Henry Kuttner and Forest J. Ackerman as coauthors on different stories), Leigh Brackett with Ray Bradbury as coauthor, and Manly Wade Wellman, but I was glad to read them again. KEW's introductions are worth reading, as were the nonfiction giving the stories context.

Anyway, I greatly enjoyed this collection.

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I had not known about C.L. Moore's disappearance from the science fiction scene and her struggle with Alzheimer's disease and her eventual coma and finally death on April 4th, 1987. I don't remember having read C.L. Moore at that time; I came to it much later, when I was reading swords and sorcery and sword and planet fiction in the 2000s, rereading old favorites and reading stories I'd not read before. That's also when I read the Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury story in this collection, though I'd read her John Eric Stark stories and novels sometime before. And the 2000s is also probably when I first read Manly Wade Wellman's stories of Hok the Mighty.