Readers of this blog know that I often decry the lack of publications that feature secondary world fantasy — especially of the action-packed, fun sort that is called variously Sword & Sorcery, Heroic or Epic Fantasy, or just plain old pulp. Recently, we’ve been lucky to get two new online venues that cater to just this sort of thing, first Beneath Ceaseless Skies back in October and, as of last month, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. I’m pleased to report that I really liked what I saw in HFQ’s inaugural issue.

HFQ #1 features three stories and two poems — like BCS, it seems to focus on quality rather than quantity, something I’d like to see from more online venues regardless of theme. And HFQ’s three stories are each meaty, well-drawn tales of secondary fantasy worlds that contrast and compliment one another nicely.

The issue opens with James Lecky’s ‘Black Flowers of Sevan,’ a Near Eastern flavored story of in which roguish mercenary captain Tula becomes infatuated with his Prince’s consort. After winning the ruthless Prince’s favor, Tula pushes beyond the bounds of hospitality and discovers a dark secret about the woman he has become fascinated with. A nicely crafted setting and smooth style distinguish the piece (though I did find the use of the word ‘Nestorian’ to indicate an imaginary kingdom a little jarring).

Perhaps my favorite of the issue is the tale of an over-the-hill dragon-slayer’s last battle, ‘Man of Moldania.’ In it, Richard Marsden gives us a real-world Eastern European setting injected with a dose of the fantastic. Golorus, an itinerant killer of drakes, plies his trade in a small town and ends up stepping on the toes of the town’s local favored son. Facing a skeptical citizenry and hostile hetman, Golorus cleverly defeats threats both draconic and human. A very fun story.

The final story of the issue, ‘Beyond the Lizard Gate’ by Alex Marshall, is a gritty dark fantasy very reminiscent of Warhammer Fantasy fiction. It deals with a quest for revenge against an evil sorcerer by his siblings, a warrior and a blind sorceress. Verging at times into the horror spectrum, this action-packed tale revels in a dark aesthetic, and its often ornate prose, though at times straining the purple, compliments the theme well.

Three stories, all good reading. If HFQ can deliver the same four times a year, fans of adventure fantasy might just find short stories back on the menu. And if that happens, maybe we really will be able to say we are living at the dawn of an electronic pulp revolution.

Rogue Blades Entertainment has just released its second anthology, and it’s a doozy. Three hundred plus pages of secondary world fantasy with a pulse, featuring stories in the classic Heroic Fantasy and Sword & Sorcery vein — but with a modern twist. Rage of the Behemoth’s overarching theme of heroes battling colossal creatures is further divided into sections based on location, such as jungles, mountains, or oceans. This gives the stories in the anthology a very strong cohesive quality, and setting becomes as much a character as the giant beasts and demons that stride across Behemoth’s pages.

And those beasts are a startling array of the familiar, the bizarre, and the completely original. There are dragons and dragon turtles, frost hydras, griffins, manticores, giant animated skeletons, warped sea monsters, and even a few beast gods. Stories range from straight adventure, to more introspective and metaphorical pieces, and Jason Waltz has again done an excellent job in not only selecting a variety of tales, but arranging them for effect.

Those familiar with RBE’s previous anthology, Return of the Sword, will recognize some of the names in this one (including my own). Behemoth also features established authors whose names you may recognize such as Andrew J. Offut & Richard K. Lyon, C.L. Werner, Lois Tilton, Brian Ruckley, and Mary Rosenblum. Fantastic interior and cover art from Didier Norman and RBE regular Johnny Perkins really complements the action — and these artists have worked to create five beautiful limited edition covers (one for each terrain section in the book).

If you are a fan of adventure fantasy, or just secondary world fiction in general, you have no lack of choice when it comes to novels. But anthologies that celebrate such themes have become a rare thing indeed since the glory days of Flashing Swords and Thieves World. RBE is doing something about that, and they’re doing it with scope and vision enough to ensure that this present resurgence in Sword & Sorcery represents the best of classic themes told with modern voices.

Have a look at the Rogue Blades Entertainment site for information on special deals on all their books, including a ’shout out’ campaign for Behemoth that offers rebates to every buyer that helps spread the word about the anthology.

This week at Black Gate I was thrilled to step back into the lands of Nyumbani in my review of the third book in Charles R. Saunders’ superb Imaro saga. Imaro: The Trail of Bohu ramps up the action and increases the stakes over the previous two volumes (both of which I reviewed here), and includes quite a few unexpected surprises — which I was at pains not to spoil in my review.

Imaro: The Trail of Bohu continues the saga of the outcast warrior Imaro in the land of Nyumbani; a rich fantasy setting based on African history and myth. But, while the first two books in the series, Imaro and Imaro: The Quest for Cush, were essentially episodic in structure (constructed as they were of Saunders’ short stories), The Trail of Bohu, the first Imaro book written as a novel from start to finish, presents us with a bigger overall story — it is, in fact, the beginning of the arc that will carry the reader through books four and five and, let’s just say, things really start to get going in this installment of the Imaro saga.

And as I and many others have said many times — this series is the work of an overlooked master of the genre and to miss it would be to miss a modern day Howard or Leiber. Thankfully, Sword & Soul Media are making Imaro, and Charles R. Saunders’ other work like the equally fantastic Dossouye, available again, and you can find The Trail of Bohu by clicking this link.

Prolific online reviewer John Ottinger of Grasping for the Wind has just posted an early review of Rogue Blade’s forthcoming Rage of the Behemoth anthology, the follow up to 2008’s Return of the Sword. Behemoth has a more focused theme than Sword, as it deals specifically with the confrontation between man and large, powerful, fantastical beasts, with each story furthermore belonging to a section based on setting (desert, jungle, ocean, frozen wastes, mountains). From John’s review:

Although at first glance, it seems that with such a singular theme, the stories would simply be repetitious in content, the authors chosen have managed to broaden the man versus monster theme and give it more depth. Rage of the Behemoth takes the best of Robert E. Howard and revitalizes it for the twenty-first century.

Nice words indeed, paricularly that quaotable and sound-bite friendly closing line. But, of course, I’m not going to stop there, since my own story ‘The Wolf of Winter’ recieved a great review from John:

Bill Ward writes a tale in “Wolf in Winter” where the monster the protagonist faces is as much himself as it is a physical being. Ward’s story of death, renewal, and the beast inside each person is one of the best of the anthology, and turns an apparent sword and sorcery tale into something quite a bit deeper. Worthy reading.

Stuff like that just makes my day.

At Black Gate this week I’ve just posted a quick ‘happy birthday’ to Michael Moorcock, who turned sixty-nine yesterday. Really an extraordinary and diverse writer, Moorcock has been one of my favorites for a long time.

He’s also one of those writers that continues to sell sword & sorcery fiction, his Elric books and Eternal Champion books seemingly reprinted every decade or so. New editions of Elric from Del Rey are out right now, as a matter of fact.

Click here for Happy Birthday Michael Moorcock

Over at Black Gate this week I posted a short reflection on Poul Anderson’s 1978 essay ‘On Thud and Blunder,’ his call for more realism in adventure fantasy fiction. A lot has certainly changed in thirty years, but Anderson’s essay is well worth reading for a lot of reasons — not least of which is the wealth of fascinating historical anecdotes he throws around.

. . . Anderson does a wonderful job of skewering so many of the misconceptions and lazy assumptions of the genre, bringing his historical knowledge to bear on such things as the day-to-day realities of a pre-industrial society, the likely workings of politics and religion, and, of course, some of the practical aspects of fighting and combat. ‘On Thud and Blunder’ does more to get the reader thinking in these terms, and inspired to go out and do some research, than a great many of today’s shallow, cynical books written on the subject of world building and aimed at the would-be fantasy writer.

It’s a great essay for the prospective writer of fantasy fiction, as well as for anyone interested in the way the genre has changed over time.

Click here to read ‘On Thud and Blunder’ — Thirty Years Later

As in a daze Cormac turned his steed and rode back across the trampled field. His horse’s hoofs splashed in lakes of blood and clanged against the helmets of dead men. Across the valley the shout of victory was thundering. Yet all seemed shadowy and strange. A shape was striding across the torn corpses and Cormac was dully aware that is was Bran. The Gael swung from his horse and fronted the king. Bran was weaponless and gory; blood trickled from gashes on brow, breast and limb; what armor he had worn was clean hacked away and a cut had shorn half-way through his iron crown. But the red jewel still gleamed unblemished like a star of slaughter.

• Title: Bran Mak Morn: The Last King
• Author: Robert E. Howard
• Genre: Dark Fantasy/Historical Adventure
• Year: 2005 (1928-32)

Conan is more famous than his creator, Robert E. Howard. Most readers approach Howard through the lens of Conan, as is only natural, and tend to look at his other heroes in terms of Conan — digging for those elements that later make their way into the stories of the Hyborian age. Kull is perhaps the most famous ancestor of Conan for, after all, it was a Kull story that was later modified to become the first Conan tale, ‘The Phoenix on the Sword.’ But all of Howard’s creations are different, as he was too good a writer to spin the same yarn twice, and all of them are informed by the age in which they find themselves. Bran Mak Morn, last King of a dying race, is a hero that Howard spent less words on than Solomon Kane, or Kull, or certainly Conan, but he was also perhaps Howard’s most personal creation.

This review is of Bran Mak Morn: The Last King from Del Rey, part of a new series that collects Howard’s tales and publishes them in their original form and chronology, with a wealth of accompanying notes, essays, and unfinished ephemera. Perhaps not all of this information is of value to the casual fan, but having Howard’s creations available in their proper form is a tremendous improvement from the situation of twenty or thirty years ago, when Howard was only available in diluted, rewritten, or rearranged form alongside a group of modern pastiche writers as part of massive, artificially-conceived series. I always distrusted those books as a kid and so unfortunately never grew up reading Howard, but now his unaltered writings are available in faithful collections from several publishers.

Bran Mak Morn grows from Howard’s fascination with the Picts — but not the Picts of modern, sober archaeology — rather the Picts of turn-of-the-century pseudo-scientific conjectural history, the sort of thing that was available in 1908 for a young Howard to read. But that, believe it or not, is a good thing; for these Picts are a mysterious people with a strange past rooted in lost continents and trans-world migrations and civilizations long vanished. Some of Howard’s magic, whether in the Bran stories or those of Solomon Kane’s skewed 17th Century or Conan’s Hyboria, grows out of the freedom of his time to fill in the gaps of the historical record with imagination — wild speculation on Atlantean colonies and strange transpositions of race were not yet the sole province of semi-educated cranks. If it was the case that less reliable history and questionable science was what Howard had to draw upon, that just had the effect of allowing him to dream bigger dreams.

And Bran Mak Morn is something like a dream of Late Antiquity. Bran, the last King of a people that are the degenerate and near-savage remnants of a race that once ruled a mighty civilization lost to the shadows of time, must fight the Roman Empire as it encroaches on Pictland north of Hadrian’s Wall. These stories are bleak and Bran is heroic precisely because he fights a battle he knows he cannot win, one that, in effect, has already been lost centuries ago. And his heroism underscores too his aloneness as the only ‘civilized’ man amongst a people who have succumbed to barbarity. Unlike Howard’s other heroic outsiders, Bran is an exemplar of his people, his fate bound entirely to their own, his significance to them resonating down through the ages long after he fought and lost his last battle.

What may be disappointing to many readers is just how few Bran stories there are; the Bran cycle consisting of essentially four stories — only two of which feature Bran Mak Morn in the sort of heroic mold of a Conan or Kull. That’s two stories in a 300 plus page hardback book. Readers expecting to discover another Conan will be disappointed, but this collection goes beyond just being about Bran Mak Morn to illuminating Howard’s keen interest in the idea of lost races of men lurking at the fringes of human history.

The first Bran story is an example of this, ‘Men of the Shadows,’ which is essentially a history of Howard’s Picts in which Bran is seen through the eyes of a captured Norse mercenary in Rome’s employ. The Picts, which are akin to H.G. Well’s Morlocks with their twisted limbs and hunched backs, are given a detailed — and highly speculative — history based on then-current theories of population migration in the ancient world. Howard’s Picts are descended from Mediterranean stock, and are slighter and darker than their Celtic and Germanic neighbors, and also debased by millennia of barbarous living. ‘Men of Shadows’ is not much of an adventure, but as a weird history illuminating one of Robert E. Howard’s driving passions, it serves as a fine introduction.

Three excellent stories follow, forming the heart of this book. In ‘Kings of the Night’ we see Bran in action for the first time, leading a coalition army against Roman onslaught, dealing with issues of his command and deployment. It’s a great battle piece, and it also features an appearance by another Howard hero — summoned from his own time to lead an unruly Norse contingent. Again we see Bran through another’s eyes, this time a Celtic chieftain, and Howard’s characterization of Bran as a shrewd leader whose paramount concern is the well-being of his own people is well-drawn.

In ‘Worms of the Earth,’ another classic tale, Bran is the viewpoint character for the first and only time. Very little of the Picts are featured here, instead Bran treats with loathsome magics to get revenge on a cruel Roman governor who has executed one of Bran’s countrymen. Bran is consumed by his hatred, and employs the aid of an even older, more degenerated people than his own. Again Howard plays with the theme that dominates all of the stories in Del Rey’s collection, but this time Bran is alone amongst forces older and darker than even his Picts.

And that’s it for Bran . . . or almost. In ‘The Dark Man’ we jump ahead some 600 years to the eleventh century, for the story of an Irish warrior fighting to rescue the woman he loves from Viking raiders. Bran Mak Morn appears in the story as a statue — the mysterious and potent Dark Man of the title — and his presence looms over the action in one great, moody piece of storytelling. The setting and concerns of ‘The Dark Man’ are completely different than those of the other Bran tales, but thematically it fits perfectly alongside the others, even giving those earlier pieces a weight they may not have had as we look back from the bloody vantage of ‘The Dark Man’ to the half-remembered past of the age of Bran Mak Morn.

More stories of Picts and lost races follow, some set in the past and some in the present, but there are no more completed Bran Mak Morn tales to be had. These later stories are worth reading, but are frankly anti-climactic after ‘Kings of the Night,’ ‘Worms of the Earth,’ and ‘The Dark Man.’ But that’s to be expected, and the book is worth it for those three pieces alone — any of them as good a Howard story as the best of those featuring his brooding Cimmerian. Everything else in Bran Mak Morn: The Last King is a bonus: some poetry, story fragments and drafts including a piece of Howard juvenilia featuring Bran written in Howard’s own hand, and an excellent appendix featuring an examination of Howard’s interest in the Picts and notes on the stories.

Ultimately, one cannot read Bran Mak Morn without wanting more, say a good dozen stories of the nature — if not the stature — of ‘Worms of the Earth,’ to really do the character justice. Unfortunately, outside of pastiches, that’s not possible, and one is left with the lingering feeling that Howard’s most mysterious hero was perhaps never meant for our knowing, and that we should be grateful for whatever glimpses of his lost world that have survived intact into our own.

• Bran Mak Morn: The Last King at Amazon
• Conan.com
• Howardworks.com

There are philosophers who argue that there is no such thing as evil qua evil; that, discounting spells (which of course relieve an individual of responsibility), when a man commits an evil deed he is a victim himself, the slave of his progeniture and nurturing. Such philosophers might profit by studying Sanctuary.
– from Joe Haldeman’s Blood Brothers

• Title: Thieves’ World
• Author: Robert Asprin, ed.
• Genre: Fantasy/Sword & Sorcery
• Year: 1979

The late Robert Asprin’s Thieves’ World is the granddaddy of the shared-world anthology, and it’s success can be seen in its numerous sequels (the original series ran to twelve anthologies in ten years, plus a few spin-off novels) as well as related matter such as rpg products, in addition to, of course, the many similarly themed anthologies that came out in homage or imitation to the original. In his afterward, ‘The Making of Thieves’ World,’ Asprin describes the shared world idea as a way for many authors to write fantasy without first having to each come up with their own worlds. Imagine, Asprin says, if Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser inhabited the same world as Conan, or if Elric and Kane opposed one another at the head of rival armies. It’s a great, fun idea, and it works well, and it certainly attracted a wide panoply of science fiction and fantasy writers over the decade it ran.

Thieves’ World is the first book in the series, from which the whole derives its name. It centers on the town of Sanctuary, a rats’ nest of rogues and hotbed of skulduggery, a conquered city on the edge of empire rife with competing factions and conflicting religions. It’s a fairly standard fantasy backdrop, at least in this first installment, but it’s also a consistent and well-realized one replete with just enough world-building style details to make the place come alive without the danger of the setting taking over from the plot. Or the characters — and this last is where Thieves’ World really shines.

Each author in the anthology has created his own character, and the book contains a larger-than-life cast of scoundrels, magicians, street folk, and thieves. The ne’er-do-well minstrel Cappen Varra, the cursed magician Enas Yorl, ruthless crimelord and ex-gladiator Jubal, ageless madame Myrtis, and mysterious Lythande, his forehead marked with a glowing blue star that burns with his anger or agitation — just a few of the most prominent personalities of Sanctuary. And while a story might focus on only a few of these characters, they turn up repeatedly again and again in the background of different tales. Indeed, this is part of the fun of the shared world, as different authors handle each other’s characters a bit differently, and even whole scenes from one story may be repeated in another with a twist in perspective. A nice touch, and one that lends the stories the feeling that many lives are brushing up against one another and interconnecting in the world of Sanctuary.

As for the stories themselves, ranging from short story to novella length, some stand out more than others. John Brunner opens the anthology with Sentences of Death, a clever piece centering around apprentice translator Jarveena and her employer, an opportunistic book merchant and scribe. When a magical scroll falls into their hands they decide to profit from it as best they can, and set off a chain of events that involves a strange magician, a foiled assassination attempt, and the fulfillment of Jarveena’s lifelong thirst for revenge. In Poul Anderson’s The Gate of Flying Knives, we have a more traditional sword & sorcery tale, in which the rogue Cappen Verra must venture into another world to rescue his love — and where he discovers that a certain slight-of-hand can be worth more than any sword or spell. In Joe Haldeman’s Blood Brothers the odious One-Thumb, a man confident in his continued existence because of a magician’s curse of damnation on anyone that should ever dare to slay him, meets his comeuppance in a most unusual and ingenious way. In my favorite story of the collection, Asprin’s own The Price of Doing Business, shrewd operator Jubal discovers just how differently those who don’t share his ruthlessly practical outlook see the world, and finds himself confounded first by a child, and then by one of the Emperor’s own elite guardsmen.

Other names that the reader will recognize, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley and Andrew Offutt, also have strong offerings; and overall the anthology is a solid mix of stories from writers of varied sensibilities at different points of their career. But the book is cohesive, the styles complimentary, and the fun firmly at center stage. I can understand how it started something big, especially as it was released before the modern fantasy explosion, and I only wish there was a comparable series today showcasing a similar broad array of talent against a shared world backdrop. One can hope — and in the meantime there is plenty in the Thieves’ World series to satisfy the cravings of sword & sorcery fans.

• Thieves’ World at Amazon
• A Notable Guide to Thieves’ World