A Sword & Sorcery Series I Really Love: Flashing Swords!, edited by Lin Carter
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.
[Click the images for flash versions.]
Flashing Swords #1 (Dell, July 1973). Cover by Frank Frazetta
Flashing Swords #1 (1973) has 4 longish stories by Leiber, Vance, Anderson and Carter. All were strong and this is probably the strongest of all the volumes. Anderson’s story, “The Merman’s Children,” is the best, and Carter’s story, “The Higher Heresies of Oolimar,” is one of his strongest ever.
The cover was an awesome Frazetta, one of my favorites of his paintings behind his Kane and Death Dealer art. The volume was dedicated appropriately to Robert E. Howard.
Flashing Swords! #2 (Dell, April 1974). Cover by Frank Frazetta
Flashing Swords #2 (1973) is dedicated to Henry Kuttner. It had four more long stories, by L. Sprague de Camp (with whom Carter had a long history), Michael Moorcock, Andre Norton, and John Jakes.
Moorcock’s story, “The Jade Man’s Eyes,” was of Elric, and Jakes’ story, “Ghouls Garden,” was about his character Brak. I’ll talk more about both authors eventually here but both these tales were very good and I particularly loved the Brak story, which made me seek out more of the tales.
Flashing Swords #1 & 2, UK editions (Mayflower, 1974 and February 1975). Covers by Bruce Pennington
The hardback has a great Frazetta cover, but have a look, too, at the paperback cover from Mayflower books (above), which I found online. I like that one even better than the Frazetta I think, although that sounds almost blasphemous.
Bruce Pennington did it and I wish I had that edition.
Flashing Swords! #3: Wizards and Warriors (Dell, August 1976). Cover by Don Maitz
Flashing Swords #3 (1976) bore a subtitle, Warriors and Wizards. It was dedicated to Clifford Ball. This was the weakest of the five volumes, although still good. It had stories by de Camp, Fritz Leiber, Andre Norton, Carter, and Avram Davidson.
The Leiber story, “The Frost Montreme” — Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser — was the strongest. Don Maitz is the cover artist. It’s good, but a bit less barbaric than I like. Very Renaissance looking.
Flashing Swords! #4: Barbarians and Black Magicians (Dell, November 1977). Cover by Don Maitz
Flashing Swords #4 (1977) is subtitled Barbarians and Black Magicians. This one is dedicated to Norvell Page, who I’ll be covering here. Stories by Vance, Anderson, Jakes (Brak; Storm in a Bottle), Katherine Kurtz, and Moorcock (Elric; “the Lands Beyond the World”).
This one is as strong as the original volume, and I like the hardback cover by Gary Viskupik. It also has some cool interior illos by Rick Bryant. The paperback cover, which I found online, is by Don Maitz again and looks like an Elric representation.
Flashing Swords! #5: Demons and Daggers (Dell, December 1981). Cover by Rich Corben
Flashing Swords #5 (1981) is subtitled Demons and Daggers. No dedication. It has a cool wraparound cover by Ron Miller, although it’s my least favorite of the series. The Dell paperback has a cover by Richard Corben.
Includes stories by Roger Zelazny (a Dilvish tale), C. J. Cherryh, Diane Duane, Tanith Lee, and the first humorous story in the series by Craig Shaw Gardner. I didn’t think it was as strong as #1, #2, or #4, but somewhat better than #3.
 |
 |
Flashing Swords! #1 & 2 (Science Fiction Book Club, April and September 1973). Covers by Frank Frazetta
In 2020, Robert Price, Lin Carter’s literary executor, revived the series as Lin Carter’s Flashing Swords. There have been two volumes published, although the first one created a minor storm of controversy over the introduction by Price. I have not yet bought or read these two volumes.
I’ve also included above the hardcover covers for volumes 1 and 2 (above), both by Frazetta.
Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for Black Gate was Sword & Sorcery on a Post-Apocalyptic Earth: Blackmark by Gil Kane.
Wonderful stuff, Charles.
And you’re absolutely right about the cover to the Mayflower edition of Flashing Swords 2. I was so taken with it that I contacted the artist, Bruce Pennington, in 2008 and asked for the rights to use it on the magazine version of Black Gate. Bruce was gracious enough to give me the rights to both that cover, and the beautiful wrap-around art we used for Black Gate 14. I’ll always be grateful to him for that!
(I have to give a shout-out to my wife Alice, who puzzled out the tiny signature on the bottom of my Mayflower paperback edition, and correctly told me the mystery artist was “Pennington,” not “Pennyworth,” as my poor eyes had seen. In those pre-ISFDB days, that was the clue I needed to start the search, that ended with a long-distance phone call to the UK to speak with man himself.)
Very cool. I can’t see that image without immediately having story ideas burst into my head.
Great article, I hold my three copies of “Flashing Swords!” (I don’t yet have them all) in very high regard. Bruce Pennington is an amazing artist; his Nostradamus-inspired collection “Eschatus” and “Ultraterranium”, which reprints various private and commercial art of his, are worth seeking out, although hard to find (they were released in 1976 and 1991 respectively).
I’m just becoming aware of Pennington. Definitely finding his work compelling, though.
A great series. I appreciate having fewer, slightly longer (novelette? I don’t think they were quite hitting novella length, at least mostly) as opposed to the Swords Against Darkness/Sword & Sorceress/etc. style of a whole bunch of maybe 15-20 page stories. (Not that I won’t happily read those as well.)
The sweet spot for me is often between 8 and 15 thousand words. Long enough to have some meat on the bones but not enough time to get dull
I have a soft spot for Wizards and Warriors (#3), as it was the first of the series that I found, in the Dell paperback edition with the St. George-esque cover by Don Maitz. And Mr. Carter’s own story, “The Curious Custom of the Turjan Seraad” is very much the D&D Dark Sun adventure I would love to run.
And the covers! The one by Mr. Maitz for the Dell edition of Barbarians and Black Magicians (#4) is one I wish I had seen earlier. Would love to add it to the library. Or the Bruce Pennington on the Mayflower edtion, which looks to me like a more subtle take on the chromatic style of Darrell Sweet. And, naturally, my print issues of Black Gate run up to #11. Missed it by thatmuch, to quote Agent 86.
Those first time covers you see can really carve themselves into your brain if they’re cool. I still remember stumbling on Kyrik: Warlock Warrior by Gardner Fox in our library with an amazing cover of a barbarian on the back of a pterodactyl with a beautiful woman beside him. I was hooked.
I love Flashing Swords and really have been collecting all the Lin Carter books – both his fiction but also his story collections and books on the genre. From used bookstores over the decades, books as / older than me – and recently a few ebay buys to try to start completing the collection.
Lin Carter deserves a lot of praise – first he helped popularise the sword and sorcery genre (scifi also). Then he saved many authors from obscurity. HPL and REH would have been 80% as popular at worst but others from Dunsany to Hodgeson would have been near forgotten and their works unaffordable but more likely unavailable. Finally though Frazetta was OK he did provide him tons of work and support – there was a news thing where a pic of “Romans” got a lot of creeps claiming silly things like degrees complaining on slight costume issues. Carter said “Just SEND us your paintings and we’ll have our Writers make up stories that kind of match! AND we’ll send you a check first!” – and he did that knowing Frazetta could sell a story. This let him experiment to continually improve his technique and earn $ doing it. And it helped Frazetta be so iconic, the bookstores were full of poster prints of these junk works. About every man of the time (and kid) remembers “Spider-Man” aka the ladies scream since there’s a tiny spider and he has to kill the poor thing because it is SO big…
Sadly he died of cancer and seems to have been bankrupt/semi-homeless. And his passing and Warren’s troubles kind of killed that wonderful 1970s era of scifi and fantasy – again DAW’s head had a heart attack and his feminist daughter took over, blacklisted Akers and Norman but propped up MZB… (oh, no problem with that… /sarcasm) So it was the same shoot self in foot being done by monopolistic owners of key properties in the Video Game, Comic Book, TTRPG worlds today – but decades earlier. There should be some kind of revival or tribute – or at least end the corruption and fixed markets so physical bookstores hold any books on consignment vs the weak erotica by female writers and no male (especially white) need submit a document.
I did a whole series of posts on Carter over on the Swords & Planet league, although I haven’t talked much about his death. His ending was certainly pretty sad. I also remember being angry over DAW suddenly cutting out their Dray Prescot series, by Bulmer. The publisher certainly went in a different direction and one less enjoyable for me.
Loved “Flashing Swords” and read all of them at sometime in the early eighties. Found a couple of the Dell paperbacks at a book sale a couple years so I had to complete the quintet. So much fun searching for old paperback copies. They fit nicely next to my DAW Elric series and my Avon black cover Amber series. Thanks for the trip down memory lane, Charles
I well know the agonies and ecstasies of searching out those old paperbacks to complete a beloved series.