The Sword & Sorcery Anthology

© 2012 by Tachyon Publications

This is a work of collected fiction. All events portrayed in this book
are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely
coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this
book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the
editors and the publisher.

Introduction © 2012 by David Drake

Interior and cover design by Elizabeth Story

Cover art by Jean-Sébastien Rossbach

Tachyon Publications

1459 18
^th
Street #139

San Francisco, CA 94107

(415) 285-5615

www.tachyonpublications.com

[email protected]

Series Editor: Jacob Weisman

Project Editor: Jill Roberts

Book ISBN 13: 978-1-61696-069-8;
ISBN 10: 1-61696-069-8

First Edition: 2012

Introduction:
Storytellers:

A Guided Ramble into Sword
and
Sorcery Fiction

 by David Drake

The Tower of the Elephant

 by Robert E. Howard

Black God’s Kiss

by C. L. Moore

The Unholy Grail 

by Fritz Leiber

The Tale of Hauk 

by Poul Anderson

The Caravan of Forgotten Dreams

by Michael Moorcock

The Adventuress

by Joanna Russ

Gimmile’s Songs

by Charles R. Saunders

Undertow

by Karl Edward Wagner

The Stages of the God

by Ramsey Campbell (writing as Montgomery Comfort)

The Barrow Troll

by David Drake

Soldier of an Empire Unacquainted with Defeat 

by Glen Cook

Epistle from Lebanoi

by Michael Shea

Become a Warrior

by Jane Yolen

The Red Guild

by Rachel Pollack

Six from Atlantis

by Gene Wolfe

The Sea Troll’s Daughter

by Caitlín R. Kiernan

The Coral Heart

by Jeffrey Ford

Path of the Dragon

by George R. R. Martin

The Year of the Three Monarchs

by Michael Swanwick

A Guided Ramble into Sword and Sorcery Fiction

DAVID DRAKE

1.

M
anly
W
ade
W
ell
man
, one of the finest pure storytellers I’ve ever known, was born in 1903 in Kamundongo, Angola; Manly’s father ran the clinic there for a medical charity. Except for Manly and his family, there were no white residents within fifty miles.

At the time, the local villagers hammered blades for their spears and knives from scrap iron which they bought from the Portuguese. In all other respects Kamundongo was a Stone Age society, culturally more similar to the first agricultural villages of Mesopotamia than to the towns of the Iron Age Greeks where Homer sang the
Iliad.

Manly’s most vivid childhood memory was of the day a ten-year-old herdboy faced the leopard that was stalking his goats and killed it with his spear. That night there was a banquet in the boy’s honor. He was seated on the high stool with the leopard’s skin, fresh and reeking, draped over his shoulders.

From his place of honor the boy doled out a piece of the cat’s flesh to every adult male. When they had eaten the meat that would strengthen their spirits as well as their bodies, the men each in turn chanted a song of praise to the enthroned hero, recounting and embellishing his accomplishment. He has vanquished the monster which threatened our lives and our livelihoods!

Behold the hero! Hear his mighty deeds!

This is storytelling as the Cro-Magnons practiced it, and this is the
essence of sword and sorcery fiction.

2.

Some people argue the definition of sword and sorcery, just as they argue the definition of Conservatism, or Christianity, or the color blue.

The editors of this anthology have chosen to start S&S with Robert E. Howard and C. L. Moore in the early ’30s and to go on from there with works which share kinship with Howard and Moore. I consider this a perfectly reasonable structure.

Robert E. Howard had been appearing regularly in
Weird Tales
since July 1925, but it was Conan’s December 1932 appearance in “The Phoenix on the Sword” which made Howard a fantasy superstar. This irritated a number of people, at the time as well as since. Comments have ranged from “Howard isn’t very good,” through “One of Howard’s other series is much better than Conan,” to “I, not Howard, am responsible for Conan’s success!”

Personally, some of the Solomon Kane stories are my Howard favorites; and most readers would agree that some of Howard’s Conan stories are better than others. As for the “I’m responsible!” claims—arrogant stupidity will always be with us.

I won’t try to explain the phenomenon, but I will state that to the best of my knowledge and belief, Conan created S&S as a publishing category as surely as Stephen King created horror as a publishing category. There have been Conan knockoffs and Conan pastiches (which are generally worse than the knockoffs) and Anti-Conans, but virtually all of the S&S which appeared after December 1932 was written in some degree with reference to Conan.

My first contact with S&S came when I read
Conan the Conqueror
as half of an Ace double when I was fourteen. I read more Howard and more S&S when I found it, but neither was readily available in Clinton, Iowa, during the early ’60s.

That initial taste had made a huge impact on me, though. Howard
understood the basics of
story
the way the men of Kamundongo did, and he communicated his enthusiasm to me as well as to many thousands of his other readers.

3.

The book on the reverse side of
Conan the Conqueror
was
The Sword of Rhiannon
by Leigh Brackett. Technically Brackett’s short novel was space opera rather than fantasy, but there was little philosophical difference between the two genres—a fact underscored by the title, which pairs “sword” with the name of a goddess/queen from Celtic mythology.

And this brings us directly to C. L. Moore, the second starting
point for the present anthology. Catherine Moore’s first story, “Shambleau,” appeared in
Weird Tales
in January 1933—the month after Conan. It was every bit as remarkable as “The Phoenix on the Sword,” but it was a space opera.

Moore wrote several stories in her interplanetary milieu before beginning to alternate stories about a male spaceman, Northwest Smith, with stories about a female swordswoman, Jirel of Joiry, who lived in a version of Medieval France as fantastic as the Mars of “Shambleau.” The two series are identical in tone and were intermingled in the volumes of their initial book publication.

Smith and Jirel are a development parallel to Conan rather than Conan’s direct offspring. Much of later S&S owes a great deal to Moore—and to space opera, in particular to Leigh Brackett.

4.

For a period in the ’60s and ’70s, Conan was as big a thing in publishing as zombies are today. This had the genuinely good result of making room on the fringes for historical/fantasy adventures which weren’t trying to rehash Conan but which wouldn’t have been (re)published if Conan hadn’t created a category. (This includes quite a lot of Howard’s own non-Conan work, by the way.)

On the fringe of the fringe were the S&S stories published in
Whispers
, the little magazine begun by Stuart David Schiff in 1973. From the second issue (credited in the third) I was Stu’s assistant editor; that is, I read the slush.

I am very proud of the assistance which I provided Stu in keeping
short-form fantasy/horror alive during a dark period. We had only
15,000 words of fiction per issue (twice that on a double issue), but
we did a damned good job. Three of our picks are included in this
volume.

Ramsey Campbell began his career with stories set in Lovecraft’s
Cthulhu Mythos, which sold to August Derleth for publication by
Arkham House. Mr. Derleth died in 1971, putting Arkham House
on hold.

When
Whispers
began in 1973, Ramsey had just become a full-time
freelance writer who was looking for new markets and new genres,
including S&S. He had been introduced to the genre at age sixteen
by the Arkham House/Howard collection,
Skull-Face
.

The stories about Ryre (under Ramsey’s own name) for the
Swords
Against Darkness
anthologies were distinctive but within the then-
accepted parameters of S&S. “Stages of the God” from
Whispers
is
unique and I think uniquely good. It shows the influence of Howard’s
friend and
Weird Tales
contemporary Clark Ashton Smith as well as
of Howard himself. It was my pleasure to recommend “Stages of the
God” to Stu, and it has been an even greater pleasure to bring the
story to the attention of the present editors.

That issue of
Whispers
already contained a horror story by Ramsey,
so “Stages” was published under a pseudonym. Ramsey created
“Montgomery Comfort” from the names of two (hack) British film
makers, Montgomery Tully and Lance Comfort.

Whispers
ran nonfiction also. Present readers may be amused (as
I was on rereading the issue) to learn that immediately following
“Stages” was an article on Lovecraft by David G. Hartwell, Ph.D.
Fantasy in the ’70s was a small world.

Karl Edward Wagner began collecting pulp magazines while he
was in high school and had completed his set of
Weird Tales
before
he and I met in 1971. His Kane was not a copy of Conan but rather
Karl’s own (darker) response to Conan.

Karl (who met Stu Schiff when I did) was involved with
Whispers
from the first. Like Karl’s most famous story “Sticks,” “Undertow”
was written for the magazine.

Besides showing Howard’s influence, “Undertow” is effectively a
S&S rewrite of “Jane Brown’s Body,” the powerful novella by Cornell
Woolrich. Karl said that connection had been unconscious, but in
any case it does nothing to detract from the effectiveness of Karl’s
version.

As for “The Barrow Troll”... I had sold two stories to Arkham
House before I was drafted, and then two more to Mr. Derleth before
he died. After that I wrote a great deal for various markets, but for
years I sold very little of it.

Whispers
was for me, as for Ramsey and Karl, a place for work that was too far from the mainstream of the field to be publishable in established markets, at least by unknowns. Like most of my fantasy at the time, “The Barrow Troll” has a real-world historical setting. The fact that I was reading Icelandic sagas then is probably obvious, but the general ambiance comes also from Professor Child’s
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads
, in particular “Clerk Colvill.”

5.

Good sword and sorcery generally has character and all the other elements of good fiction, but the thing S&S
must
have is story. The
best writers of sword and sorcery are the best storytellers in the fantasy
field. Read this anthology and savor it.

And have fun!

Dave Drake

david-drake.com