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This month has primarily been about reading books for the review section of the upcoming issue of Black Gate. So, aside from a Hellboy graphic novel I snuck in at the beginning of the month, and Iain M. Banks’ Against A Dark Background which I read on the plane to and from Atlanta (and which I wisely sat aside unfinished when my big box of BG review books arrived), it’s been all BG, all the time for me in September.
So, what have I read? First was The White Raven, Robert Low’s third installment of his gritty Oathsworn saga. This one finds Orm and the Oathsworn some five years after the events in The Wolf Sea and settled in lands provided by Jarl Brand. But thiers can never be a peaceful existence, not so long as the rumors of their discovery of a mountain of silver cling to them. Drawn back into the orbit of Attila’s lost treasure, the Oathsworn find themselves once again in the frozen waste of the Russian steppe in the service of the young prince of Novgorod. Grim, gritty, poetic, authentic — Low’s Oathsworn series is one of my personal favorites of recent years and this installment does not disappoint (and if you haven’t already, check out my review of the first book, The Whale Road, at Black Gate).
And from one modern masterpiece of historical fiction I turned to a past master of the genre, Harold Lamb. Two new Lamb books from Bison Books have just been released, part of Howard Andrew Jones’ efforts to collect and preserve Lamb’s pulp adventure fiction, and I have the honor of reviewing both. Swords From the West, a collection of Lamb’s Crusader-Era fiction, dominated most of my reading time last month. It’s a massive book, containing two short novels, a few novellas, and other short fiction of various lengths. Its companion volume, Swords From the Desert, is about half the size and is what I’ll be reading once I get West finished.
Lamb’s fiction combines a stunning depth of knowledge of culture and history with a mastery of pace and plot that grabs the reader and doesn’t let go. In Swords From the West we have stories about men of honor encountering peril and adventure in the exotic East, and duels, battles, chases, sieges, tricks, traps, and stratagems abound. Writing at a time when many pulp writers used race as a kind of shorthand for good and bad, Lamb’s balanced appraisal of the peoples and cultures in which he sets these stories — his hero could be a Crusader Knight in one story and a Muslim wanderer in the next, his villains as likely to be rapacious Arabs and venal Venetians — was truly ahead of his time, and his language of customs, languages, and history of the region of the Near East and Central Asia is impressive.
Lamb was a true master of the art, and the best of his fiction a virtuoso performance few could match. We are extraordinarily lucky that his legacy is being preserved in such fine volumes as Swords From the West.
Two more fantasies rounded-out my reading last month, Brandon Sanderson’s stand alone novel Warbreaker, and a Warhammer novel from Anthony Reynolds, Knight of the Realm, which is part of a series. Both are lighter fare than the two books I’ve mentioned above. Knight of the Realm is a satisfying continuation of Reynold’s action adventure series that began with Knight Errant, and it’s chock full of grim imagery, larger-than-life villains, and massive battles. Warbreaker is in some sense just the opposite, being about the struggle to stop an impending war between two kingdoms. Sanderson’s story revolves around two princesses from a small nation that 
suddenly find themselves in the middle of political machinations in a powerful rival empire. The real star of the novel is Sanderson’s magic system, BioChromatic Breath, which is a transferable life essence that can make a person more alive and heighten their senses, or be used to animate inanimate objects.
But hey, if you want to know more you’ll have to buy the next issue of Black Gate when it comes out!
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I keep meaning to pick up some of those Howard Lamb collections from Bison Books. It sounds like Swords from the West might be a good place to start. Any thoughts on how it compares with the ‘Steppes’ stories in the previous 4? volumes?
And I’ll certainly be getting the new BG in December, isn’t it?
I think Swords From the West is sort of the perfect place to start, for a couple of reasons. One big one is variety — you have stories in Europe, in the Crusader Kingdoms, and in Transoxiana and Persia and places in Central Asia, and you’ve got stuff ranging from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. Then too, many of the stories are about the fusion of cultures, and the tension of East meeting West, and the enormous variety of points of view that creates. You also have everything from short stories to short novels all in one package, and historical figures and events rubbing elbows with creations of Lamb’s own devising.
I think these stories may be more accessible to Westerners as well, as Khlit and his world (what admittedly little of it I have read at this point — and yes it is 4 volumes of Cossack stories) is more alien to us. As far as action and pace go, well, you’ll get that no matter what you pick up, and there’s certainly no shortage of it in Swords From the West.
You can read a few of the stories that are in this volume in the old online Flashing Swords — ‘The Golden Horde’ and ‘Protection.’
Thanks for the additional insight and information. Looks like this might make the perfect holiday gift to myself.