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As of 2003 January, the following are out of print: Plague Summer (1980) and The Shift (1987) and The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster (1992).
Note that the entire text of The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster has been posted on this site free to read here. Similarly, the entire text of The Worshippers and the Way has been posted on this site free to read here.
Buy Hugh Cook's Books - Corgi Paperbacks
Buy Hugh Cook's Books - hardback - hardbacks
When Corgi (Transworld) remaindered the UK stock of Hugh Cook Corgi paperbacks, the remaindered books were purchased by Colin Smythe. These books were then given new ISBN numbers. As of 2003, some of the paperbacks were still available for purchase in the UK. Also, some of Hugh Cook's books were available as hardbacks published by Colin Smythe.
As of 2003 January, a small number of paperback copies of The Worshippers and the Way (1992) are available in the UK from www.amazon.co.uk ... click on "books" then enter the title into the search engine on the left hand side of the screen.
Similarly, as of 2003 January, limited stocks of either the paperback edition or the hardback edition or possibly both may be available in the UK from www.amazon.co.uk for the following titles:-
The Wizards and the Warriors (1986)......
The Women and the Warlords (1987).....
The Walrus and the Warwolf (1988).....
The Wicked and the Witless (1989).....
The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers (1990).....
The Wazir and the Witch (1990).....
The Werewolf and the Wormlord (1991).....
NOTE: as of 2004 January the following are definitely out of print:-
....
The Wordsmiths and the Warguild (1987)
.... The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster (1992)
In the USA you may be possibly able to buy copies of some of the above titles secondhand through either ebay or
www.amazon.com.
Good luck!
A List of Books Hugh Cook has Written
.....Plague Summer..... London:
Robert Hale, 1980 (0-7091-8707-6) and Palmerston
North, New Zealand: the Dunmore Press, 1980
(0-908564-48-1)
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Hugh says:
"This book is about a career criminal who gets involved with an illegal drug deal at a time when there is an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in New Zealand. Availability? Well, it's possible to find this book in some libraries in New Zealand. It's about two hundred pages and about 60,000 words, and took me about two years to write. Looking back, it's hard to believe the amount of effort that went into writing something which, in retrospect, is fairly simple.
"The influences? Drugs were very much in the news at that time, and a non-fiction book that I read about an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain gave me a sense of how apocalyptic this would be for an agricultural country like New Zealand. I did most of my growing up in a rural part of Northland, in the north of New Zealand's North Island, with a dairy farm just across the road."
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.....The Shift ......
London: Jonathan Cape,12 February 1987 (0-224-02389-6) and New York: Vintage Books (Random House), June 1987 (0-394-74739-9).
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Hugh says:
"This book was a finalist in the 1985 Times/Jonathan Cape Young Writers Competition and in fact was written for that competition. Having seen the competition details in a New Zealand newspaper, I raced through a draft of 30,000 words in six weeks in time to make the deadline. After the book was accepted for publication, my editor at Jonathan Cape suggested that longer would be better, so, at a more leisurely pace, I went through and doubled the length.
"This is a free-wheeling science fiction book with far too much sex and violence for some people's tastes. I unleashed my aberrant wit, giving it unrestricted liberty, and the result is like very hot curry: it has its fans, but it's definitely not to everyone's taste.
"Availability? In 2002 I did see a copy being advertized on e-Bay. Apart from that, this one could be really hard to track down ... although some New Zealand libraries undoubtedly have copies."
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CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS
Hugh says:-
"This ten-volume fantasy series was influenced by (a) Tolkien and (b) the Cold War.
"I was very much a child of the Cold War, growing up at a time when science fiction writers, looking into the future, saw (time and again) nuclear catastrophe.
"The "Chronicles of an Age of Darkness" series follows the lives of various characters in a world of war and weapons. Those who like it tend to like it a lot, and those who do not like it tend to recoil, as one might when one reaches for a towel and discovers, unexpectedly, that it is soaked with wet.
"(Is it really that bad? Well, no, I don't think so. But I was looking for a really hard-edged close-up-and-accurate description of reality. My objective has always been to see preciselyn, not to see through a veil of gauze.)
"Availability? Colin Smythe published some of the volumes in hardback, and at this writing (August 2002) I believe that some of the hardbacks are still in print (details at Amazon.com). I believe that some of the Corgi paperbacks are also available through Colin Smythe (once again, details at Amazon.com)."
"Note: each of these books is designed to stand alone, and any one can be read, out of sequence, without reference to the rest of the series. Each book contains a beginning, a middle and an end - no book in this series ends with an unresolved cliffhanger still waiting for its resolution."
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.....The Wizards and the Warriors..... Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1986 (hardcover) (0-86140-244-8) and London: Corgi (Transworld) 1986 (paperback) (0-552-12566-0). Published in the United States as Wizard War by Popular Library (Warner Books) June 1987 (paperback) (0-445-20422-2 ... first printing ... and then 0-445-20860-0 for later printings, these being sold in Canada as 0-445-20423-0 and 0-445-20861-9). Published in Germany (in German) as Der
Todesstein by Heyne, 1998 (paperback) (3-453-14034-6). top
Hugh says:-
"The Wizards and the Warriors, the first volume of the ten-volume Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series, is very much a standard Tolkienesque quest with swords, dragons, battles, magic powers and so forth. However, it differs from many other such sagas in that there is no clear dichotomy between good and evil."
Link to "Is Tolkien war propaganda"? question in diary.
Hugh says:-
"Western thought is focused on thesis versus antithesis. In its most vulgar, simple-minded form, this boils down to the notion that if we can see the bad guys standing over there then it necessarily follows that we must be the good guys.
"A certain number of fantasy trilogies buy into this notion without reservation, to the point where they constitute propaganda in favor of genocide. A case in point is Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which can be read very much as an argument in favor of genocide, the intended victims being the race of orcs.
"The fact that orcs do not actually exist is really neither here nor there. The cultural attitude itself is dangerous, particularly for people who lack the sophistication to understand that life is not a cowboy movie.
"By identifying an axis of evil or a kernel of evil we can give ourselves the right to kill on suspicion, to libel alien cultures, to imprison our enemies without trial, to tear up international treaties, to make war without necessity, to trash nation states then to walk away from the smoking rubble without any regrets for the collateral casualties buried in the rubble.
"Sounds extreme? Well, the evil influence that is warping my world view in the direction of the extreme is the daily newspaper ...."
Link to "Is Tolkien war propaganda"? question in diary.
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.....The Wordsmiths and the Warguild..... Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1987 (hardcover) (0-86140-267-7) and London: Corgi (Transworld) 1987 (paperback) (0-552-13130-X). Published in the United States as two separate volumes, both paperback, by Popular Library (Warner Books). The first volume was The Questing Hero March 1988 (USA 0-445-20654-3; Canada 0-445-20655-1). The second volume was The Hero’s Return October 1988 (USA 0-445-20664-0; Canada 0-445-20665-9). The same two-volume format was followed by Heyne for the German-language edition, published in paperback as Held Wider Willen (1998) (3-453-14035-4) and Toguras Ruckkehr (1998) (3-453-14039-7).
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Hugh says:-
"The Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series got off to a good start with The Wizards and the Warriors which featured the invasion of the south by an army from the north. My next step was to write The Women and the Warlords which, logically enough, featured a character who accompanied that army of invasion.
"The Women and the Warlords was, apparently, a miscue, at least from a commercial perspective. Nobody said so outright, but I was politely asked to write an intermediate book to sit between The Wizards and the Warriors and The Women and the Warlords.
"Not really understanding why I was being asked to write this additional book, I nevertheless sat down and wrote it, and had fun doing so ... the result was The Wordsmiths and the Warguild which is the story of Togura Poulaan, a rather hapless young man who endures all manner of adventures but achieves nothing. If he had achieved something, he would have upset my ideas for the overall structure of the series, which was already becoming difficult to control.
"As The Wordsmiths and the Warguild was not a long book to start with, I was a bit dismayed to have it cut into two parts for American publication ... but much worse was to come in due course."
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.....The Women and the Warlords..... Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1989 (hardcover) (0-86140-265-0). The hardcover was co-published by Dufour Editions of Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, with the ISBN 0-8023-1286-1. London: Corgi (Transworld) 1987 (paperback) (0-552-13131-8). Published in the United States as The Oracle by Popular Library (Warner Books) July 1989 (paperback)(in the USA as 0-445-20914-3 and in Canada as 0-445-20915-1. Published in Germany (in German) as Die Traumdeuterin by Heyne, 1998 (paperback) (3-453-14919-X).
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Hugh says:
"In retrospect, The Women and the Warlords was a big commercial mistake, and probably killed the series, although by then the series had so much momentum going that it took a while to die. The book focuses on a woman, one Yen Olass Ampadara, who gets about as bad a deal in life as it is possible to get.
"However. This is my favorite book in the series. I don't know why I'm so emotionally invested in it, but probably it's because it's the one that took the most effort to write.
"Of my first twelve novels, this is the only one written from the viewpoint of a woman, and writing from that viewpoint meant that every single little thing was difficult. Scenes that I would otherwise have written automatically had to be thought through carefully.
"In fact, from a technical point of view, this was the most difficult book that I've written.
"The main problem with The Women and the Warlords is that, by and large, the main character does not have a lot of fun, and all too many readers seem not to have had a lot of fun either."
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.....The Walrus and the Warwolf..... Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1992 (hardcover) (0-86140-294-4) and London: Corgi (Transworld) 1988 (paperback) (0-552-13327-2), the same printing being later marketed by Colin Smythe with the ISBN 0-86140-395-9. The first third of this was published in the United States as Lords of the Sword by Roc (Penguin USA), 1991 (paperback) (USA 0-451-45065-5; Canada 0-451-45065-5).
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Hugh says:-
"The Walrus and the Warwolf was a big hit with the people who might be described as my hard-core fans. By this stage, the series was already critically short of readers, but those who got this far reported finding themselves amply rewarded.
"The Walrus and the Warwolf is a very long book but it was easy to write for a number of reasons. First, I had finally gotten myself a word processor which allowed me to save text to disk - everything I had written previously had been done on a typewriter. (The Wizards and the Warriors, which is another very long book, went through three typewritten drafts.)
"The second reason why The Walrus and the Warwolf was easy to write was because by this time I was writing full-time. I had become a full-time professional writer ... in fact, I had the privilege of writing full-time for about seven years, until the money finally ran out.
"As I was ignorant of the fact that by this stage the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series was in deep trouble in the marketplace - in retrospect, I think someone gently tried to communicate this to me, but I was too ignorant to take the hint - I was feeling extremely optimistic.
"In addition to time, technology and optimism, I had chosen an easy structure. The Walrus and the Warwolf focuses on a single character, Drake Douay, and it is a picaresque novel - that is to say, one about the adventures of rogues. It is very easy to control a novel which consists of a single hero having a string of adventures, so technically, despite its great length, this was a very easy novel to write.
"For the American market, a decision was made to cut the book into three separate volumes. I was asked to suggest where to make the breaks, which I did, and my suggestions were accepted. At that stage I was untroubled by the news that the book would be published in fragments, as the considerable length, coupled with the picaresque structure, made it perfectly reasonable to think that three novels could be made out of the single original text.
"I was also asked to write three pieces of introductory material, one for each of the projected three books, to try to compensate for the breaks. I did this, too.
"However, in the end, only one of the three books was published. After that, nothing happened with regard to the next two volumes. In the United States, the status of the The Walrus and the Warwolf was that one third had been published as Lords of the Sword ... and after that, nothing.
"This remains the worst thing that has happened to me in the course of my writing career."
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.....The Wicked and the Witless..... London: Corgi (Transworld) 1989 (paperback) (0-552-13439-2).
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Hugh says:
"This is the story of Sean Kelebes Sarazin, and I remember being particularly pleased with it because what I got down on paper was pretty much exactly what I had planned to write.
"I have often had the experience of losing control of a project, of running up against insurmountable technical diffficulties, or of tearing up my original plan five or six times to try a different approach ... not an efficient way to write.
"However, in the case of The Wicked and the Witless, what I planned to do is exactly what I did.
"Such considerations are, of course, meaningless to the reader, who cannot tell whether a book does or does not square with the writer's original plan.
"In writing The Wicked and the Witless I successfully wrote a book which overlapped the action and time frame of some of the earlier books in the series. However, doing this proved so difficult that, even though I pulled it off, I was persuaded to change the scene for the next two books."
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.....The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers..... London: Corgi (Transworld) 1990 (paperback) (0-552-13536-4); stock from this printing was subsequently marketed by Colin Smythe with the ISBN 0-86140-397-5.
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Hugh says:
"The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers is the sixth book in the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series and represents something of a disjunction.
"One of the odd things about writing this series was that I was working in something close to a total vacuum, with very little feedback in the form of editorial comment, reviews or fan mail. (Not zero, but little.)
"I later figured out that one of the big problems a lot of people had with the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series was that the books vary considerably from each other in length, setting and tone. It's not a consistent product, in other words.
"From my point of view, it was logical to vary each book, as I was conscious of the fact that I was still learning my craft, and I did not want to simply repeat myself.
"In the case of The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers I had additional, pragmatic reasons for wanting to change the way I did things.
"In the course of writing the first five books of the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness I got thoroughly sick and tired of the mechanical business of moving characters across vast swathes of landscape. Since the environment was distinctly low-tech, travel was usually by ship or by horse. All I know about ships is that they float (if you're lucky) and all I know about horses is that they have four legs (and can sleep standing up).
"When I sat down to write The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers it struck me that things would be distinctly easier if I did my best to preserve the unities of time, place and action. Consequently, the action of this book, and of the following book, The Wazir and the Witch, is set in and around the city of Injiltaprajura, the ruling city of the island of Untunchilamon.
"When I was a child, I left England at the age of five or six and spent the next two years on a tropical island called Ocean Island. This island (otherwise known as Banaba) is near the equator. There is (and was) no airport. Ships arrived about once every six weeks or so bringing mail. The ships also brought in water.
"Ocean Island was the model for Untunchilamon ... in other words, when I was writing The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers, and its companion book, The Wazir and the Witch, I was reaching right back to childhood memories."
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.....The Wazir and the Witch..... London: Corgi (Transworld) 1990 (paperback) (0-552-13537-2); stock from this printing was subsequently marketed by Colin Smythe with the ISBN 0-86140-398-3.
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Hugh says:
"Neither The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers nor The Wazir and the Witch advanced the overall arc of the series. They were in fact set a bit earlier than the previous books. By this stage things had gotten so complicated that I was having trouble figuring out what the overall arc was, far less how to handle it."
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.....The Werewolf and the Wormlord..... London: Corgi (Transworld) 1991 (paperback) (0-552-13538-0); stock from this printing was subsequently marketed by Colin Smythe with the ISBN 0-86140-399-1.
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Hugh says:
"This is a werewolf story, as might be guessed from the title, and is partly about the convenience of having enemies. It is also partly about the inconvenience of possessing oil, particularly if you are an ork, and the oil happens to be inside you - in your blubber, that is.
"The particular technical challenge I set myself for this book was to write a book which is entirely set at night. This is more difficult than might be thought - let your attention slip just momentarily, and suddenly it's broad daylight again."
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.....The Worshippers and the Way..... London: Corgi (Transworld) 1992 (paperback) (0-552-13848-7); stock from this printing was subsequently marketed by Colin Smythe with the ISBN 0-86140-400-9.
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Hugh says:
"The Worshippers and the Way was the ninth book of the series. As with books six, seven and eight, it was written with the idea of preserving the unities of time, place and action.
"In the case of this book, the main technical challenge was the plot, and I am very pleased with the result.
"The action is set partly in the high-tech Combat College, a remnant of an ancient civilization, and partly in the low-tech city of Chi'ash-lan."
Update by Hugh, 2002 December 1:-
"Today I got an e-mail from a reader in New Zealand who politely pointed out that, no, the Combat College is not set in Chi'ash-lan but in Dalar ken Halvar. A little surprised at this assertion, I checked, and found that, yes, the text clearly and unambiguously says that the Combat College is in Dalar ken Halvar."
Dalar ken Halvar: aka City of Sun: aka City of the Season:
capital of Parengarenga. Though set high on a vast mountain
plateau, it is by no means cool, for the Hot Mouth on the city
outskirts (one of the several Mouths of the upland plateau)
constantly outbreathes hot, dry, dessicating air.
The city is where it is because of the Combat College, the
nearby silver mine wealth (less than legend's rumouring, but
nevertheless substantial), the secure defensive positions afforded to the paranoid by the upthrusts of those miniature mountains
known as the Caps, and the Yamoda River's reliable waterflow -
water being always and ever the first and last essential of urban
civilization.
Hugh continues, 2002 December 1:-
"Looking at the above, I have to confess that I don't remember the Hot Mouth, the several Mouths of the upland plateau, the Caps or the Yamoda River.
"At this writing, the CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS series is several projects in the past.
"One of the necessary tasks I had to do when I stopped writing the CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS was to break the spell of dragons and swords so I could move on with the next thing, whatever that was going to be. This, plus the passage of time, plus all the work done on subsequent projects, explains my own fuzzy grip on the work."
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.....The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster..... London: Corgi (Transworld) 1992 (paperback) (0-552-13849-5).
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Hugh says:
"By this time I had finally figured out that this series was no longer finacially viable. (I was probably the last person on the planet to work this out.) So I wrote this to be the wrap-it-all-up-and-end-the-arc book.
"By the time I sat down to write The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster I had been trekking in Nepal, which helped out with some suitably epic scenery. In fact, I figured out some of the plot for this book as I was hiking along Himalayan trails in a world which (then) was without electricity.
"This book is physically massive, and contains about a quarter of a million words. By this time I had long since abandoned my word processor and had graduated to a fully-fledged computer. The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster was written with a word processing program called PC-Write running under an operating system known as DOS on a computer which had a twenty-megabyte hard drive ....
The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster could reasonably be described as Tolkien on steroids. It is the story of the questing hero Guest Gulkan.
I was very pleased with the final result, which did make it into print, but by then, as a commercial proposition, the series was dead.
So what's next?
Hugh says:
"After finishing the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series, I eventually went back to university, finished off my degree (which ended up being a BA with a double major in English and Japanese) and then moved to Japan and started teaching English.
"I arrived in Japan in 1997. Over the next five years, I did a lot of work on short stories, some of which were published in various outlets in England, Australia, Ireland, Canada and the United States.
"However, I also continued work on my major fantasy series, Tales of Oolong Morblock, and in 2002, with the series well advanced, I decided to divide it up into twelve books, publish half of these on the Internet (in serialized form) and publish the other half as print-on-demand books.
"What's next, then, is the Tales of Oolong Morblock series. I am also planning to publish a collection of short stories, The Succubus and Other Stories, some time in the next two to three years."
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