Part 2 of my review:
I want to say it here again, that I really love Sword & Sorcery and hope that I will be reading something great every time I begin a new story. And when it doesn’t start well, I keep on reading hoping it gets better and I am really looking for things to like about it and that I could recommend favorably. I was really hoping this second part of the review would be much more positive and make the book at least a decent anthology overall. But my reaction turned out to be something else:
It’s just going to get a lot worse.
- Soldier of an Empire Unacquainted with Defeat by Glen Cook (1980): When the story began with a centurion of the Demon Guard of the Dread Empire, I didn’t exactly have high hopes for it. But it turned out to be good. Really good. I think it’s a rather odd pick for this collection, being three times as long as the other stories in the book and not having a lot of action or magic. There are a couple of spells, but the whole story could have been told entirely without them, and the action scenes would have to be called hyper-minimalistic. At some points I wasn’t sure if there even had been an implied at all, and at the end I didn’t know if the last enemy was killed or spared. It usually goes like “his blade flashed forward” and four sentences later “he spotted a vulture circling above” and that is all indication you get that there had been a fight at all. Bit weird to read, but otherwise the story is really quite good. Even though it’s not a magic about either action or magic. And I totally did not see the big twist at the end coming! How often does that still happen with this cliche-ridden genre? I am quite reminded by this story of Sapkowskis The Last Wish, which so far is the only Sword & Sorcery book I like as much as Conan. Not only is the mood quite similar as well as the protagonist, there are also several plot elements that reminded me of The Lesser Evil and The Edge of the World. It actually would surprise me if Sapkowski hadn’t read this story before writing his own. Though it’s nothing like plagiarism, only very loosely inspired by it and then done something quite different with them. Great story, a joy to read.
- Epistle from Lebanoi by Michael Shea (2012): I really hate this one. Convoluted sentences crammed with as many rare, antiquated, and made up words as possible make this a tedious chore to struggle through. And the plot isn’t anything good either. The first half is rambling monologues of infodumps that don’t make any sense, and the second half a big chaotic battle full of weird shit happening that doesn’t make any sense. The protagonist and narrator is only a bystander who doesn’t actually do anything and the entire time I hadn’t had a clue what’s going on. Nor did I actually care.
- Become a Warrior by Jane Yolen (1998): Blargh! This is awful. It’s incredibly cheesy, sappy, really boring, but thankfully short. For the plot, I really have no words. I hate it! It offends me. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t have any action or magic, so I don’t have even the slightest clue how anyone in his right mind could have even considered this for a Sword & Sorcery anthology. I think this is the worst entry in a Sword & Sorcery anthology I’ve seen so far, and that includes everything in Swords & Dark Magic and Sword & Mythos. No, just no!
- The Red Guild by Rachel Pollack (1985): This one is about an aloof girl assassin with mysterious powers and a dark and troubled past. This is about as interesting as it sounds and uses the cheap old trick of deliberately withholding critical information that all the characters know, to create a fake sense of mystery and depth. The second half has some supernatural element that is noticably lacking in most of the other stories, but all of that is overshadowed by the sappy drama.
- Six from Atlantis by Gene Wolfe (2006): Well, this was unpleasant. No plot, no context, no reason, no sense.
- The Sea Troll’s Daughter by Caitlin Kiernan (2010): I already reviewed this one as part of Swords & Dark Magic last year. It’s a story I really enjoy, even though it deals more with the rather unheroic aftermath of an adventure than the actual adventure itself and it’s clearly written as comedy. But it’s a story of foolhardy carousing and entertaining chaos, which is consider the true essence of Sword & Sorcery that makes it special, and which is lacking in many more recent stories. And I think it was genuinly funny. I like this story.
- The Coral Heart by Jeffrey Ford (2009): This story has a mighty warrior with a magic sword and there’s some real action and sorcery yhere. But the first three quarters of this story only bored me. The ending was just really stupid.
- Path of the Dragon by George Martin (2000): I know that Daenerys is character from the Song of Ice and Fire series, so that apparently makes this story part of it. If it’s something supplementary he wrote to the books or a couple of chapters from one of the books I can not say, could be either. He knows how to write, I give him that. He constructs solid sentences and effective dialogues and arranges them in a way that is smooth to read, without being pretentiously elaborate. This is a lot more than can be said for most of the writers in this book. But I have not read the Song of Ice and Fire series, so I have no idea what the context of this text fragment is and who all those people or places are and what kind of campaign this might be they talk about the whole time. The first third of it is some people I don’t know, talking about other people I don’t know, some tournament 30 years ago, and politics I don’t know anything about. In the meantime they occasionally play with baby dragons. The rest of the book is a quick stop in some slave port in which the protagonist is appalled about the condition and treatment of the slaves. There is no action nd no sorcery here. Really, it’s all one really big chunk of exposition. Quite well presented exposition that avoids turning into a too obvious infodump, but still exposition about a nove I don’t know anything about and that isn’t the subject of this book. And yet it is by far the longest entry in this book. As good as the man writes, this really shouldn’t have gone into this anthology. Had they put it at the very back of the book as a preview, that might perhaps have been okay, but something like this really shouldn’t happen.
- The Year of the Three Monarchs by Michael Swanwick (2012): “When the castle guards burst upon her, Slythe triumphantly exclaimed, “The tyrant is dead and I have killed him. I am now your ruler.” But, “Our loyalty is not to the man but the office,” the captain of the guard said. “You do not wear the Diamond Crown of Ilyssia. Therefore you must die.”
So, yay or nay?
Well what do you think? FUCK, NAY!!!
You will very often hear that Sword & Sorcery has a bad reputation for being infantile and badly written with a strong leaning towards trash. And reading anthologies like this, I really can no longer make any arguments to refute this claim. If this book is indeed representative of Sword & Sorcery, then the genre is indeed dominated by shit! And I don’t mean unrefined writing and cliched plots with too much dumb violence that is only good for an immature chuckle. To call it trash would be misleading, as there are always people with a certain affectionate enjoyment for trashy art. But this? This is indeed just shit!
There were some exceptions, of course. The Tower of the Elephant, Black God’s Kiss, Gimmile’s Songs, Undertow, Soldier of an Empire, and The Sea Trolls Daughter are all very nice stories, but the majority of this book is just terrible and completely out of place here.
So what about that pretentious title “The Sword & Sorcery Anthology”? It’s not “The Complete Collection of Sword & Sorcery” and not “The Best of Sword & Sorcery”. If you want to know how the Sword & Sorcery genre got it’s reputation for being terrible crap, this is indeed the book you are looking for. After you read it, you’ll probably agree with all the detractors.
And that is a shame. Sword & Sorcery can be such a wonderful genre of daring adventure, larger than life heroes, magical places, and mystical creatures. Which you barely get to see in this book. Or this one, or this one. I am done with this crap. I am really very much tempted to simply stick with a few famous authors and read everything that they have written, by ignoring all the junk on the fringes. Because what new writers have I discovered reading these shitty anthologies? C. L. Moore, C. J. Cherryh, and Caitlin R. Kiernan. (Which happen to have a funny naming pattern. ^^) Sorry Ladies, but as much as I enjoyed your stories and looking for more, that’s not enough to have made this ordeal worth it.
To anyone interested in Sword & Sorcery fantasy, I very much recommend against picking up anthologies, at least any that have been released after the 80s. Instead take a look around for the most famous writers of the genre and pick up books from those who specifically strike you as interesting. I can very much recommend Robert Howard and Andrzej Sapowski, who I consider the best in the field, and what I’ve read from Glen Gook and Charles Saunders were also not quite bad. And if you feel you really have to, Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock at least knew how the genre works and how to make it work for them, even if I don’t consider them good writers. But at least they are fun! Fun! That’s what Sword & Sorcery is all about.
Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.
– Robert Howard: The Phoenix on the Sword, 1932