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Author: Fletcher Vredenburgh

A Hero in the Service of Organized Crime: A Review of Jhereg by Steven Brust

A Hero in the Service of Organized Crime: A Review of Jhereg by Steven Brust

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oie_250265755JIVFDZI’m always excited to find a new author, especially one with a long back catalogue for me to plunge into. With 26 novels to his name, Steven Brust is one of those finds.

When I first started blogging about swords & sorcery I spent some time looking around for newer books and series (newer for me meaning anything written after 1984). Again and again, people suggested Steven Brust’s Dragaeran Empire series. Without reading too much about it I learned the main protagonist, Vlad Taltos, had a little pet dragon. Right away my brain flashed some kind of warning and, fearing the books might be too cute by half, I rejected them.

Well, a few weeks ago Bill Ward wrote very highly of the adventures of Vlad Taltos. I figured why not? For a penny (plus $3.99 shipping) I ordered The Book of Jhereg (1999), an omnibus containing the series’ first three books: Jhereg, Yendi, and Teckla. Though still apprehensive of the little dragon, I started on Jhereg (1983) and blew through it in two days. Well I’m feeling a little foolish now for not having overcome my dracophobia much sooner.

The Dragaerans are nearly immortal, seven foot tall beings with slightly pointed ears and more finely featured than humans. Their society is divided into seventeen houses, each with its own traits and skills. Humans are a small and disfavored minority. The human Vlad Taltos is an assassin in House Jhereg, the Dragaeran equivalent of the mafia.

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Battle in the Dawn: The Complete Hok the Mighty by Manly Wade Wellman

Battle in the Dawn: The Complete Hok the Mighty by Manly Wade Wellman

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oie_1743857GRCQJimHHistorical adventure fiction is one of the primary roots of swords & sorcery. From it you get the same fast-paced adventure in exotic settings.

Some writers of S&S, Robert E. Howard and Sprague de Camp for example, wrote historical adventure fiction alongside their more fantastic stories. Often the tales involve battling Crusaders and Saracens, high seas Viking adventures, swashbuckling freebooters, or Roman centurions fighting Teutonic hordes. Sometimes, though, they star cavemen.

Manly Wade Wellman spent his childhood in a primitive village in Portuguese West Africa. Till he died Wellman spoke of a young boy forced to kill a leopard in order to protect cattle. Other boys had been less lucky and had fallen prey to leopards. His time and experience in Angola was perhaps the greatest influence on his life, but most certainly on his prehistoric stories.

In 1939, after a decade of writing pulp science fiction with titles like “The Disc-Men of Jupiter” and “Outlaws on Callisto,” Manly Wade Wellman introduced his Cro-Magnon hero, Hok the Mighty, in the novelette “Battle in the Dawn.” Four stories followed before he retired the character. While there’s a strong anthropological component to the Hok stories, with footnotes explaining then-current thoughts on the discoveries made by early man, these five tales get progressively more fantastic.

In 2010 Paizo collected all the Hok stories, along with several fragments and the cavenmen vs. Martians mini-epic “The Day of the Conquerors,” in Battle in the Dawn: The Complete Hok the Mighty for their Planet Stories line.

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Deepest, Darkest Eden edited by Cody Goodfellow

Deepest, Darkest Eden edited by Cody Goodfellow

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oie_11233710dfgxIM2cClark Ashton Smith, one third of the Weird Tales triumvirate along with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, has been a favorite of mine ever since I bought a copy of the Lin Carter-edited collection Hyperborea. I was thirteen or fourteen and Smith’s archly told stories of the titular prehistoric land and its impending doom before an encroaching wall of ice, stunned me. I was long familiar with Lovecraft’s purple prose, yet nothing had really prepared me for Smith’s cynical, lush, and utterly weird writing. The stories were stunning and I was a fan.

I was pretty excited when John R. Fultz announced that he had a story in soon-to-be-published Deepest, Darkest Eden,  a collection of new stories edited by Cody Goodfellow and set in Smith’s Hyperborea. As soon as I finished reading Fultz’ post (and letting my brain drink in the gloriously pulpy cover by Mark E. Rogers) I headed over to publisher Miskatonic River Press’ site and ordered my copy. I couldn’t wait to get the return to Clark Ashton Smith’s decadent, dying land into my hands.

For me, stories set in someone else’s created world, or using their characters, need to center on what makes the original special. They don’t need to replicate it exactly, and with Clark Ashton Smith’s idiosyncratic prose it would be a mistake to try, but they should aim for similar artistic goals. Ryan Harvey, in his long article about Smith’s Hyperborean Cycle, concluded that it’s an “unusual medley of elements, with Lovecraftian themes rubbing against satiric jabs, elevated mocking language, black jokes, and a sense of a slow, chilly annihilation that cannot be escaped”. That gives any author setting out to play in Smith’s imaginary Hyperborea a wide array of ideas to pursue.

Many of the stories in Deepest, Darkest, Eden — and there are eighteen plus two poems — are very successful at meeting my test for success. Several of the authors have clearly subsumed the alternately funny and despairing world view of Smith and mixed it with their own talents to create worthwhile additions to the Hyperborean Cycle.

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October Short Story Round-up

October Short Story Round-up

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Another month, another batch of new short stories for your reading enjoyment. First there’s the usual complement of two stories from the October issue of Curtis Ellett’s Swords and Sorcery Magazine. Then, between Beneath Ceaseless Skies #131 and #132, there are an additional seven stories. I was hoping the Autumn Heroic Fantasy Quarterly would hit the ether before I had to get this done, but no such luck.

oie_44528E6erIABHSwords and Sorcery Magazine is straightforward. See that title? That’s pretty much what you get and I consider that a good thing. That I’m writing this while listening to Manowar’s Battle Hymns is absolutely appropriate.

Swords and Sorcery opens with James Lecky’s “Forged in Heaven, Tempered in Hell“. The story is told alternately from the perspectives of Halvari, High Priest of Baal-Rethok, and Kharchadour the God-Slayer as they face one another across the battlefield. The priest is the chief servant of the last of the demonic idiot gods and the God-Slayer is the man who’s killed all of Baal-Rethok’s co-deities.

The priest’s narrative consists mostly of begging his master to destroy the approaching warrior, while the God-Slayer’s recounts his origins. There’s nothing strikingly original about the plot, but what makes this story work is the bloody determination of Kharchadour. Also, I’m a big fan of the standalone short story that doesn’t feel like it’s missing a real beginning or ending, of which this is a great example.

Donald Jacob Uitvlugt is the author of S&S’s second story, “Right of Ultissima.” Lady Alina of Marovia is introduced smashing open the door to the Loremaster Tolek’s lab with her sword. For twenty years, she has sought vengeance for her father’s death. Before she can act, Tolek calls for the Rite of Ultissima, the privilege of speaking a last few words before death. What he says forces her to reconsider her entire life. Uitvlugt refers to his writing as haiku fiction: short and impactful. At under 1,800 words, it is pretty short. Its impact, mostly derived from some not surprising psychological insights, and unfortunately not the trappings of magic and swords, is only moderate.

So last month I was excited that Beneath Ceaseless Skies seemed to be back on the heroic fiction train. Well, that train derailed.  Issue #131, the double-sized fifth anniversary issue, has five stories — one to commemorate each year of its existence — and not a single one can be even marginally considered heroic fiction. I almost don’t care that two of them are really good.

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The Great Captains by Henry Treece

The Great Captains by Henry Treece

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oie_262359311A1AFqJk

They were great men, yet to see them only as men, stripped of their doom-driven greatness, is to represent them on too trivial a scale. To draw them as massive heroes only would be to recreate them as inhuman cyphers.

from the preface to The Great Captains

The Great Captains (1956) is Henry Treece’s brutal and gripping version of the King Arthur story. Treece has pruned away the romantic embellishments that have obscured the old legend and returned it to the historic time and place in which it might really have happened. Excalibur isn’t buried in an anvil, but a tree stump, and Camelot isn’t a fairy tale castle, but a restored Roman town. Instead of an anachronistic quasi-medieval setting, the story unfolds during the bloody chaos of the waning days of Roman Britain decades after the last legionaries sailed for Gaul.

Britain’s darkest hours came in the Fifth Century AD, when waves of Germanic invaders swept across the English Channel. Stripped of all Roman soldiers in 407 AD, the people of Britain were forced to fend for themselves. In the end, they failed. None of the 1,000 or more prosperous Roman-style villas survived the Saxon onslaught. London, once rich and home to 60,000 people, was abandoned. Starvation and violence covered the land. Yet there were moments of hope.

In the middle of the Fifth Century AD, Ambrosius Aurelianus, a soldier of noble Roman ancestry, rallied the people and raised an army. For years, he fought off the invaders. His success spurred on the British and a generation after his death, the Saxons were routed at the Battle of Badon, securing another generation of peace for the land. According to the Historia Brittonum, written around 828 AD,

The twelfth battle was on Mount Badon in which there fell in one day 960 men from one charge by Arthur; and no one struck them down except Arthur himself.

This is the first historical mention of Arthur. The Historia goes on to document twelve great battles waged by Arthur, dux bellorum (war leader), against the Saxons and their allies. From this, all the great legends of Arthur Pendragon, Once and Future King, arise. And though many historians today have come to doubt he existed, Arthur lives on as the chivalric hero who leads the righteous against a seemingly overwhelming enemy.

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The Magic Goes Away by Larry Niven

The Magic Goes Away by Larry Niven

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The Magic Goes Away-small

A swordsman battled a sorcerer once upon a time. In that age such battles were frequent. A natural antipathy exists between swordsmen and sorcerers, as between cats and small birds, or between rats and men. Usually the swordsman lost, and humanity’s average intelligence rose some trifling fraction. Sometimes the swordsman won, and again the species was improved; for a sorcerer who cannot kill one miserable swordsman is a poor excuse for a sorcerer.

So begins “Not Long Before the End” (1969), the first story in Larry Niven’s The Magic Goes Away series. His approach to swords & sorcery is the same as the one he brought to the hard science fiction he’s best known for: extravagant and colorful yet built on a framework of logic.

As you might infer from the tone of the quote, he also has a bias against the warrior hero typical of the genre and in favor of the sorcerer. In the short story above, its sequel “What Good Is a Glass Dagger?”, and the short novel The Magic Goes Away, he chronicled the adventures of a sorcerer called Warlock in a pre-historic Earth located somewhere to the right of Robert E. Howard’s Hyboria.

Niven’s starting point was to theorize how magic might work in a rational way. In his model, sorcery is powered by mana, a finite source. Instead of telling stories of the glory days when wizards built flying castles, and dragons and gods walked the earth, these tales are set in the magical world’s fading days. It’s a clever setup and one that drew me in enough to read the whole trilogy this past week.

“Not Long Before the End” is an inversion of the too-common S&S story of barbarian swordsman rescues girl from wicked sorcerer. Here Warlock discovers the nature of mana and realizes it’s running out.

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God Stalk by P. C. Hodgell

God Stalk by P. C. Hodgell

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God Stalk P. C. Hodgell-smallOut of the haunted north comes Jame the Kencyr to Rathilien’s greatest city, Tai-Tastigon. From the hills above, the city appears strangely dark and silent. She arrives at its gates with large gaps in her memory and cat claws instead of fingernails. She’s carrying a pack full of strange artifacts, including a ring still on its owner’s finger… and she’s been bitten by a zombie. Wary, but in desperate need of a place to heal, Jame enters the city. So begins God Stalk, the first book in P.C. Hodgell’s Kencyrath series and one of my absolute, bar none, don’t-bother-me-if-you-see-me-reading-it, favorite fantasy novels.

When this book first came out in paperback in 1983, my friend Carl bought it at the original NYC Forbidden Planet on 13th Street. Raving about it, he tossed it to me. Then I passed it to someone else. By the time it finished its circuit through the rest of my friends and back to its original owner, its cover was bent, stained, and more than a little torn. I’ve gone through several copies myself over the years, having lost or upgraded it multiple times. When I reread it this past week, I was excited that I enjoyed it as much as, if not more than, I had in the past. I’m so grateful Carl gave me this book thirty years ago. P.C. Hodgell seems so far below the general fantasy radar, I don’t know if I would have ever heard of her at all, which is pretty darn shameful.

The Kencyr are a group of three races sworn to the service of the Three-Faced God and bound together by him to fight Perimal Darkness, a warping force of chaos and evil sweeping over the planes of existence. The rulers of the Kencyr are the human-looking High Born, of which Jame is one. The warriors and artisans are the Kendar, still human-looking but larger and longer-lived. Finally, there are the giant catlike Arrin-Ken, the judges.

As Jame remembers bits and pieces of her missing life, an eons-old struggle against the Darkness is revealed to the reader. The Kencyr fled to Rathilien three thousand years ago after betrayal at the highest level almost led to their extinction. Jame may have an important place in the war and among her people, though every answer leads to another question, some not answered until much later in the series.

The history of the Kencyr and their endless war are really only the background for God Stalk. This novel centers on Jame’s adventures during a year in Tai-Tastigon. From the night of her arrival during the Feast of the Dead Gods, her residency in the great city is one of constant action and intrigue.  She has entanglements with bandits, thieves, innkeepers, and deities. It’s a dangerous place, but also enticing.

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Daughter of the Bright Moon by Lynn Abbey

Daughter of the Bright Moon by Lynn Abbey

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oie_6554332ckBTZkt Daughter of the Bright Moon (1979) by Lynn Abbey has been sitting on my swords & sorcery to-be-read pile for a long time. One of the main goals I set for myself when I started blogging was to read all the classic era S&S I could. Not only does DotBM date from S&S’s golden age in the 1970s, its hero, Rifkind, is one of the earlier sword-swinging women. This was a book that demanded a look.

Even with all that going for it, I didn’t get to it until last week. Every now and then, I felt like it was staring at me, admonishing me for not having read it already. I mean, I’ve known about it since I read a fun write-up on Rifkind in the Giants in the Earth column in Dragon Magazine #57 and my dad actually had a copy in the attic.

I even started it last year, but stopped after a chapter or two. I don’t know why… I liked it, but maybe something shiny caught my eye.

Warrior women characters have been around forever. There are the myths of the Amazons and the valkyrie. In real life, of course, there was Joan of Arc.

Jirel of Joiry was the first swordswoman to star in her own stories. C. L. Moore created her kick-ass French noblewoman in 1934, but for decades after that you really had to dig to find fighting women as the lead protagonists.

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September Short Story Roundup

September Short Story Roundup

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Each month, there is enough new fantasy short fiction published to fill a small anthology and it’s right out there on the Internet, just waiting to be read for free. For the past year and a half, I’ve been turning to the pages of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Swords and Sorcery Magazine for a steady dose of new stories. I’m always on the lookout for new sources so if you have any suggestions please, let me know.

Swords and Sorcery MagazineI don’t know anything about Curtis Ellett, editor of Swords and Sorcery Magazine, but for nearly two years now he’s been publishing two stories every month. His is a bare-bones e-zine that pays very little, yet has manages to publish fun and worthwhile stories. This month, both stories are good, though only one can be called heroic fantasy.

September’s issue opens with “Carnival Man” written by Alexandra Seidel. Every generation or so, the Carnival Man appears in a random city and calls all, humans and undead alike, to participate in his great revel. Some, like the wandering bard Lykaris, are chosen to serve as members of his personal entourage. With little plot, it reads more like notes from a dream than a story. A good dream, yet a little vague for my taste.

Jeffery A. Sergent‘s “The Young God’s Tears” is more in keeping with the magazine’s title than Seidel’s story. Jade, a young thief and mixed-race daughter of “a robust crusader from the Northern Realms” and a “tiny, porcelain princess from the Eastern Empire,” takes a bet to see if a fabled set of gems really exists. The wager leads her to infiltrate a temple and complications ensue. It’s middling S&S, straight up no chaser. It’s got a nice bit of world-building and some solid action. Nothing extraordinary, but a fun way to spend fifteen minutes.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies publishes every two weeks. They’re not tethered to heroic fantasy and for the past few months they had been letting me down by publishing lots of sci-fi and modern fantastic stories. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but when you’re looking for an S&S fix, it does not satisfy. This month, BCS is back on track as far as I’m concerned.

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Three Against the Witch World by Andre Norton

Three Against the Witch World by Andre Norton

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oie_2122256U6CJIW64Daybreak - 2250 A.D.-smallWhen I was growing up in the seventies, the most represented science-fiction author in the children’s section of my local library was Andre Norton. Her books took up more shelf space than either Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov. Maybe the children’s librarian was a fan.

And then there were the Andre Norton books on my father’s bookshelf. As cool as the cover of Daybreak – 2250A.D. looked, I never read it. For the next forty years, I managed to avoid anything by Norton.

Then two years ago, as I was getting my Swords & Sorcery blog up to speed, I pulled out my copies of Lin Carter’s Flashing Swords series. There in the second volume was “Toads of Grimmerdale” by Andre Norton.

Carter’s enthusiastic introduction was enough to make me give it a shot. Since I knew many of Norton’s novels were young adult, I wasn’t expecting a story about revenge. Woven from strands of darkness and shards of ice, it’s a haunting introduction to Witch World that I strongly recommend.

“Toads” was enough to make me root through the boxes of my dad’s old books, hunting for other Witch World stories. Since then, I’ve read the first three novels in the series — Witch World (1963), Web of the Witch World (1964), and Three Against the Witch World (1965) — as well as two collections of stories: Spell of the Witch World (1972) (reviewed by me at my site) and Lore of the Witch World (1980). It’s the third novel I will speak of here.

In Witch World (just reviewed here by Matthew David Surridge), Norton takes ex-U.S. soldier and blackmarketeer Simon Tregarth and tosses him through a dimensional gate. He must adjust to a world of super-science and magic, and quickly at that, for he must choose sides in a war. Simon is immediately caught up in the affairs of the witches of Estcarp and their ongoing struggle against the thuggish realm of Karsten. He joins a group of exiles and settlers from other dimensions and plunges into battle on and under the sea, in the air, and into far dimensions.

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