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| Behold! I bring you fire and knowledge! |
Jeffro's first magnum opus finally hits the market. It's been a long time coming, and even those of us who followed the blog post series that inspired this have been slavering to get our hands on a copy of the final book. It's been updated with additional analysis, new commentary, and discussions with and by some of the all time greats.
This might be the most important sci-fi/fantasy book of our generation.
It's hard to overstate the impact of Jeffro Johnson's scholarship. The discoveries he made when he delved into the forgotten past of genre literature and the connections he made between the style that was and the style that exists today have inspired a new generation of writers to pick up the pen and a new generation of editors to pick up a check-book. And this new breed's rallying cry of, "Regress Harder!" would never have sounded from the rooftops of social media had Jeffro not wandered in from the tabletop gaming wilderness and proclaimed the ancient wisdom buried by the zealots of a new religion of nihilism and destruction. They scorned and vilified him for parting the dark curtain of their ignorance, yet he balked not! Nay! He fought them off, and in so doing his resistance rallied new converts to the wisdom of the ancients.
I am the least of these new authors. But from the depths of my toils, I have seen a resurgent beauty among the pages of the self-published that I thought lost to the ages. Perhaps those rare echoes of stories from better days would have bloomed had Jeffro not this forbidden knowledge, but even then they would not have found such fertile soil in the minds of like minded men who accepted the gospel of Jeffro into their hearts and resolved to do better. And to ignore the pleas of the ones who buried knowledge of the Old Masters. And to heed the wisdom of Jeffro, who showed us all a better way.
The old magic runs deep, and it is just as effective today as ever.
Anyone who ever thrilled to the classic tales of Tarzan and John Carter and Northwest Smith and Conan and Elric and Jirel owes it to themselves to read this book the better to understand how they stand the test of time. Anyone who ever enjoyed the pale shadows and imitations of those iconic characters owes it to themselves to read this book, the better to understand what magnificent works undergird the modern hero. Anyone who ever wanted to write a book that carried the weight of a "Three Hearts and Three Lions," the romance of "A Princess of Mars," the poetic action of a "Red Nails", or the grim tragedy of "A Black God's Kiss" owed it to themselves this book the better to understand the import of all those elements and how they weave together to make a story leap from the page.
In short, if you're a fan of fantasy or science fiction, you owe it to yourself to read this book.