Black Gate

Flashing Swords! #2, 4, & 5 (Science Fiction Book Club, September 1973, May 1977,
and December 1981). Covers by Frank Frazetta, Gary Viskupic, and Ron Miller

It’s time to take a look at another Sword & Sorcery anthology series I really love: Flashing Swords, edited by Lin Carter. It is second in my affections only to the Swords Against Darkness 5-book series edited by Andy Offutt that I wrote about here last year.

Flashing Swords! came out of the group known as SAGA, which stood for the Swordsmen and Sorcerers Guild of America, a group in the 1970s and 80s that included almost all the elite S&S writers of the age.

They were an informal group but Lin Carter was the closest thing they had to a leader. Under his editorship, five outstanding anthologies of works from their members appeared, all new stories, not reprints. As shown in the pictures below, I have the volumes from Dell paperbacks, as they were originally released, and three from Nelson Doubleday in hardback (above), as they were offered by the Science Fiction Book Club.

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Of Men and Monsters, by William Tenn
(Ballantine Books, December 1975). Cover by Boris Vallejo

After posting about The Borrowers by British author Mary Norton (1903 -1992) last week, several people mentioned other books and movies with similar kinds of themes — little people living in the houses of big people. I thought I might take another post to discuss a few other examples from my own book collection.

First up is series by American author John Peterson (1924 – 2002). The first one was just called The Littles and was published in 1967, 15 years after The Borrowers (1952). The Littles live much like the “borrowers. They look human except for having tails. (In films they apparently look very mouselike but that’s not the case in the books.)

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The Borrowers and The Borrowers Afield, by Mary Norton
(Odyssey/Harcourt, January 1998). Covers by Marla Frazee

I’ve done four posts in a row on Edgar Rice Burroughs, with more to come. But right now it’s time for a change of pace.

It’s going to be a big change for this particular post. It’s about The Borrowers. In my late teens, after I learned Andre Norton was a woman, someone told me she’d written books under her own name of Mary Norton, and that one was called The Borrowers. Turns out this wasn’t true; her original name was Alice Mary Norton, although she changed it legally to Andre Alice Norton in 1934. This was in the late 1970s, pre-internet, and I believed Andre Norton wrote The Borrowers for several years. It added to her charm for a while because I’d read The Borrowers when I was 11 or 12 and adored it.

The Borrowers may seem pretty far afield from Sword & Planet fiction, but the story of little people living in human houses and borrowing things from them, which would explain why things got “lost,” inspired my imagination and I invented many stories of myself shrunk down to that size and adventuring. After I wrote Swords of Talera, my first S&P novel, I toyed with the idea of writing an S&P story with borrower size characters but never did. Many many years later I discovered a graphic novel from DC called Sword of the Atom, which somewhat scratched that itch for me. (More on that later.)

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Any discussion of Sword & Planet fiction needs to start with Edgar Rice Burroughs and his book A Princess of Mars. I discussed that series extensively — and also his other S&P series, the Carson of Venus books, and his Moon Maid trilogy, which is partially S&P — in Part I of this series.

But, of course, ERB wrote many other books that have no connection to S&P fiction. They are still very good stories, though, entertaining and worth discussing. I thought I’d cover some in my next series of posts.

Most  readers I know discovered ERB through the character of Tarzan. The first ERB I read was A Princess of Mars, but the second one was Tarzan Lord of the Jungle. The book was an old hardback, with no dust cover. The cover was generally brown with the title embossed on it. I found it among my sister’s books. She was the only other big reader in my family. I don’t know how she came upon it. I still remember some fifty+ years later the opening scene, with Tarzan dozing on the back of Tantor the elephant. And before long Tarzan finds a lost civilization of crusaders in deepest Africa. And there was swashbuckling.

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