{"id":14014,"date":"2010-04-28T20:20:19","date_gmt":"2010-04-29T03:20:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/?p=14014"},"modified":"2015-09-25T09:18:17","modified_gmt":"2015-09-25T16:18:17","slug":"george-h-scithers-and-amra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/george-h-scithers-and-amra\/","title":{"rendered":"George H. Scithers and Amra<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

On April 19th, George H. Scithers (pictured above, circa 2001)\u00a0passed away. On April 20th, Damon Sasser wrote a post for the REHupa<\/em> blog summarizing Scithers’ accomplishments in the fantasy\/sci-fi field. Damon did a fine job and I see no real need to write another eulogy as such. I do, however, want to acknowledge the debt I owe Mr. Scithers. He and Amra<\/em>, the fanzine he edited, had a profound effect on my reading choices these past thirty years or so.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One day in spring several years ago, I was in Topeka, Kansas competing in my state’s spelling bee (I’d been suspended from school\u00a0for three days earlier in the year; I like to maintain a certain balance in my activities). After I’d\u00a0“spelled out” (or whatever the correct\u00a0term\u00a0might be) midway through the contest, my mother took me to a local mall as a sort of consolation prize. At the Waldenbooks therein, I found\u00a0a copy of The Blade of Conan<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Blade of Conan<\/em> (as well as its companion volume, The Spell of Conan<\/a><\/em>) was a collection of articles (along with some fiction and poetry) drawn from George Scithers’ Amra<\/em> fanzine. It opened the eyes of my barely-teenaged self to a lot of fantasy fiction that I was unaware of. Eddison<\/a>, Dunsany<\/a>, Jack Vance, Fletcher Pratt, Cabell,\u00a0Flaubert, Mundy, Rohmer: discussions of those authors and their works could be found between the Sanjulian<\/a>\u00a0covers of that pair of\u00a0volumes. Some authors\u00a0were utterly unknown to me aforetime, while others were mere names mentioned in passing\u00a0elsewhere. In addition, articles about REH (as well as various hard-to-find pieces written by Howard) were provided by Glenn Lord.\u00a0I read and reread those books cover to cover.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Blade of Conan<\/em> and The Spell of Conan<\/em> would be the closest things I’d own to anything approaching “fantasy lit-crit” until I started college. By then, I’d hunted down many\u00a0of the works I’d read about and had a\u00a0fairly solid grounding in the history of the\u00a0field of fantasy literature. I would have to say those two collections\u00a0contributed pretty heavily to yours truly ending up on this fine website. My thanks to Mr. Scithers for that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On April 19th, George H. Scithers (pictured above, circa 2001)\u00a0passed away. On April 20th, Damon Sasser wrote a post for the REHupa blog summarizing Scithers’ accomplishments in the fantasy\/sci-fi field. Damon did a fine job and I see no real need to write another eulogy as such. I do, however, want to acknowledge the debt […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,55,10,30],"tags":[1107,1004,931,1106,177,1110,1111,1112,390,135,833,1108,1109,813],"class_list":["post-14014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biography","category-fandom","category-literary-reputation","category-other-authors","tag-amra","tag-amra-magazine","tag-e-r-eddison","tag-george-h-scithers","tag-glenn-lord","tag-gustave-flaubert","tag-jack-vance","tag-james-branch-cabell","tag-lord-dunsany","tag-sax-rohmer","tag-talbot-mundy","tag-the-blade-of-conan","tag-the-spell-of-conan","tag-weird-tales"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14014"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16818,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14014\/revisions\/16818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}