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Swords & Dark Magic, the New Sword and Sorcery, Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders, eds. (Eos, 978-0-06-172381-0, 517 pages, $15.99). Cover designed by Joy O’Meara.

Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories, Charles N. Brown and Jonathan Strahan, eds. (Night Shade Books, 978-1-59780-180-5, 355 pages, $24.95.) Cover art by Claudia Noble.

Is Anybody Out There?, Nick Gevers and Marty Halpern, eds. (DAW, 333 pages).

Asimov’s, 4-5/09.

Interzone 226.

 

We were talking about “the new Sword and Sorcery” here a few months back, a rising tide of which has been appearing for the last couple of years on novel bestseller lists as well as in dedicated markets such as Black Gate and ezine Beneath Ceaseless Skies and even occasionally in the traditional print SF magazines. And here comes the first dedicated anthology of such stuff, Swords & Dark Magic, the New Sword and Sorcery, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders.

So what’s new about the new Sword and Sorcery? There’s still plenty of supernatural menaces here, demons, hideous monsters, black magicians, and plenty of bloody swordplay, heads and arms hacked off, torsos skewered, and so forth. It seems to me that the biggest difference is one of attitude, and perhaps location. The new S&S is grittier, tougher-minded, more politically and psychologically cynical, and more realistic (as far as a genre featuring men fighting fantasy monsters with swords can be said to be “realistic” in the first place). The protagonists tend to be hard-bitten and world-weary, with stained and ripped clothes, battered weapons and armor, types who doggedly do their jobs in spite of hunger and exhaustion rather than flamboyant rogues setting off to seek adventure. Tough, tired, and weather-beaten mercenaries are popular as characters. If you can imagine Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe kilted out with swords and armor and fighting demons and evil gods, you’ve pretty much got it.

Locations may have changed the most. Gone are the gorgeous, jewel-studded, ruined palaces and sumptuous throne-rooms that Conan used to frequent; most of the stories here take place instead in miserable back-country villages consisting of a few ramshackle, half-ruined buildings, impoverished and stinking holes full of mud and goats and flies and dim-witted gawping villagers, where the beer is sour and the people ugly, the kind of place, to paraphrase Monty Python, where everybody’s got shit all over them. I strongly suspect that Spaghetti Westerns have been a major influence in the reimagining of this subgenre.

If you’ve ever had a taste for Sword & Sorcery at all (some people don’t), I suspect that you’ll find this to be an enormously entertaining book. Certainly it will be in the running for the title of Best Fantasy Anthology of the year when it comes time to sum up 2010. There’s a spine of ancestral figures here—a new Elric story by Michael Moorcock, a tale of the Black Company by Glen Cook, a Majipoor story by Robert Silverberg—but, quite appropriately for a book dealing with “the New Sword and Sorcery,” the bulk of the anthology is taken up by relatively newer writers, who do much of the heavy lifting. Best stories here are “Goats of Glory,” by Steven Erikson, “A Rich Full Week,” by K.J. Parker, “A Suitable Present for a Sorcerous Puppet,” by Garth Nix, and “The Fool Jobs,” by Joe Abercrombie, but the anthology also features, in addition to the Moorcock, Cook, and Silverberg stories mentioned above, an elegant but enigmatic story by Gene Wolfe, a complex and strange reimagining of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by Tanith Lee, and good work by Caitlin R. Kiernan, James Enge. C.J.Cherryh, and others. A few of the stories end a bit abruptly, most notably Bill Willingham’s, which just seems to stop, and Steven Erikson’s, which seems to trail off into the beginning of another story entirely, but there is really nothing here that isn’t entertaining in one way or the other, and I’d have to judge the book to be a resounding success overall.

While we’re talking about Sword and Sorcery, this would probably be an appropriate place to mention a big retrospective collection by the man generally credited for coining the phrase and naming the subgenre in the first place, Fritz Leiber. Leiber has seemed in danger of being forgotten in the years since his death, and so it’s a pleasure to see Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories, compiled by Charles N. Brown and Jonathan Strahan, a hefty retrospective that brings many of his best stories back into print again. Leiber was a seminal figure in the development of both fantasy and science fiction, and his long series of stories about the swashbuckling adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser is one of the foundation stones of the whole sword and sorcery subgenre, casting a long shadow that is clearly discernable today in the “Darger and Surplus” stories of Michael Swanwick, the “Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz” stories of Garth Nix, and in much other work. This substantial collection gathers much of Leiber’s best short work, including “Smoke Ghost,” the story that, decades before Stephen King, practically invented the modern urban horror story, “Coming Attraction,” which was once singled out by critic Algis Budrys as one of the most significant and prophetic SF stories in genre history, “The Girl With the Hungry Eyes,” perhaps the first psychic vampire story, “A Pail of Air,” a post-Apocalyptic story which is still strongly affecting subsequent work in this area to this day, and “Space-Time for Springers,” still the best fantasy cat story ever written, in spite of hundreds of others produced since. And lots of other good stuff, including “America the Beautiful,” “Four Ghosts in Hamlet,” “Gonna Role the Bones,” and nine others. The only quibble I have with the collection is the inclusion of “The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars,” a weak late-period Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story, but then, you also get stronger Fafhrd and Mouser stories such as “Ill Met in Lankhmar” and “Bazaar of the Bizarre.”

One of the key mysteries to confront both modern science and modern science fiction is the Fermi Paradox, devised by the great physicist Enrico Fermi, which can be simply stated as, Where Is Everybody? If there are really millions of star-systems in the universe capable of supporting life, as scientists theorized in the early part of the 20th Century, a large percentage of which may have developed technological civilizations, then why haven’t any of those alien civilizations visited us? Why can’t we even find any trace of them? Can it possibly be true that, against all odds, we’re alone in the universe after all, that Earth is the only planet where intelligent life—and perhaps life of any sort—exists? Many writers have offered fictional solutions to the Fermi Paradox in the last few years, and now Nick Gevers and Marty Halpern have assembled a bunch of new takes on the subject in the original anthology Is Anybody Out There? A bit dry and abstract, perhaps, with lots of metafiction of various sorts, this is still a good deal more substantial than the average DAW anthology, and contains a lot of good reading—although not, I think, any award-winners. The best stories here are “Permanent Fatal Errors,” by Jay Lake, “The Taste of Night,” by Pat Cadigan, and “The Word He Was Looking for Was Hello,” by Alex Irvine, but there’s also good stuff by Matthew Hughes, Paul Di Filippo, Sheila Finch, David Langford, Felicity Shoulders and Leslie What, and others. The two most frequent solutions to the Paradox suggested here, by the way, is that the universe is actually a whole lot smaller than we think that it is or (one I lean toward myself) that we’re surrounded and bombarded by communications from alien civilizations all the time, but just don’t know how to recognize them.

The best story in the April/May Asimov’s, by a good margin, is Steve Popkes’s novella “Jackie’s-Boy,” which does a good job with the difficult balancing act of delivering a (sort-of) optimistic After the Apocalypse story, or at least one where, yes, most of humanity may be dead, but at least the well-drawn and sympathetic protagonist ends up in a positive life-space, in a curious family of sorts where he can heal and grow; there may even be a smidgen of hope held out here for the longer-term prospects of humanity at large (although it would have to be a pretty long-term, screwed up as things are). Perhaps it’s the river trip, but the thing this ends up reminding me the most of is Huckleberry Finn. Also good in April/May are Robert Reed’s “Pretty to Think So,” about a scientific experiment gone wrong with disastrous—and ultimately unexpected—results, and the novella “The Union of Soil and Sky,” by new writer Gregory Norman Bossert, very impressive indeed for a first sale, a tale of enigmatic archeological discoveries on an alien planet that goes on a bit too long, and also suffers from the presence of cartoon Evil Small-Minded Villagers who are not very convincing.

Below this point, most of the stories in April/May are flawed in one way or the other, although none of them are really awful. Barry B. Longyear’s “Alten Kameraden” is a riveting piece of historical fiction throughout most of its length, extremely well-crafted, but takes a sudden left turn into fantasy toward the end that I can’t credit for a moment, and which ruins it for me. Pamela Sargent’s also well-crafted “Mindbrand” suffers from a welter of viewpoint characters in the early going, at least one of which is totally unnecessary, before settling down in the middle with the character who should have been the protagonist from the start; it’s also too long, especially as any experienced genre reader is going to have figured everything out long before the end, practically from the very beginning, in fact, which means that the climax doesn’t carry much suspense or excitement. The fantastic element is very sleight in Molly Gloss’s “Unforseen” and Eugene Fischer’s “Adrift,” which (although, yes, again, both are very well-crafted) are basically thinly-disguised mainstream stories—the things said about insurance in the Gloss story are just as true about insurance companies today as they are about her futuristic “Remediable Death Insurance,” and the refugee situation in “Adrift” would be no different if the refugees had reached a container ship or an oil platform today rather than Fischer’s high-tech transfer station of tomorrow. So the fantastic elements here are at best a metaphor enabling the authors to talk about the social problems of today—legitimate SF, I guess, but not my favorite sort. Tim McDaniel’s farcical “They Laughed at Me in Vienna and Again in Prague, and Then in Belfast, and Don’t Forget Hanoi! But I’ll Show Them! I’ll Show Them All, I Tell You!” is much too long for its weight, and tries too hard to be funny.

The best story in Interzone 226 is probably Jay Lake’s “Human Error,” a tale about asteroid miners having a deadly squabble over an alien artifact they discover—nothing particularly new here, conceptually, but nicely handled. Also good here is Mercurio D. Rivera’s “In the Harsh Glow of Its Incandescent Beauty,” about a man obsessively following his ex-lover to the ends of the solar system, convinced that she’s been stolen from him by the application of a mind-altering chemical aphrodisiac; this turns out to be both true and not true. The motivations of the human-obsessed aliens here, the Wergens, who are willing to do almost anything for the humans they’ve become fixated on (and who remind me a little of Al Capp’s Shmoos, who will invite you to eat them and obligingly fall over dead if you look even the slightest bit hungry), may be a bit hard to understand if you haven’t read Rivera’s other story in this sequence, “Longing for Langalana.” Rachel Swirsky’s “Again and Again and Again” is a incisive and amusing study of Future Shock played out over a number of generations, showing us that the more things change, the more they stay the same. “Hibakusha,” by Tyler Keevil, is an intense and passionate story about a survivor dealing with grief and survivor guilt after an atomic bombing of London—perhaps a bit too intense, since after awhile, the unrelenting intensity of the protagonist’s grief, driving him toward what would be basically an odd protracted form of suicide, begins to seem mannered and unconvincing. Jason Sanford’s “Into the Depths of Illuminated Seas,” is a fantasy/slipstream sort-of pirate story, with a particularly surreal and unexplained slipstream fantastic element that might have been easier to accept if the story didn’t go on for as long as it does.