In Lands That Never Were: Tales of Swords and Sorcery from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Gordon Van Gelder
395 pages
Published 2004
Read from February 15 to February 22
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Much like Colin Meloy’s
Wildwood, I repeatedly checked this book out of the library in the early years of this blog, but never actually read it. It’s an anthology of sword & sorcery tales first published in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Back in those days, when I still had an unreasonably starstruck idea of the magazine, that seemed like an irresistible intersection of my interests.
Why didn’t I read it back then? Well, Van Gelder’s slapdash introduction, which doesn’t have much to say and isn’t properly formatted for printing (utilizing hyphens in place of em dashes, for instance), didn’t help lure me in. And the book’s formatting—12 point Times New Roman, copy-and-pasted without regard for the finer details of typesetting—was weirdly off-putting. Which is a shame; my first real introduction to sword & sorcery came instead from Lin Carter’s Year’s Best anthologies, which I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
I want to make a point in the coming months of reading as much S&S, classic and new. (I have my reasons.) So now’s a good time to push through and finally check this one off.
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“The Hall of the Dead” by Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp (1967). I have longstanding issues with Howard, but at least the dude knew how to create impeccable atmosphere. This imitation, built by de Camp from Howard’s brief outline, is fine, but lacks the gallop and fire of classic Conan. It feels plotted by rote, checking off boxes, a product rather than a story. That said, I do enjoy a giant slug patrolling a cursed, ruined city, and that’s just the prelude to a fun dungeon crawl. C
“A Hedge Against Alchemy” by John Morressy (1981). First of the Kedrigern stories, which I’ve never particularly cared for. “Fantasy cliches, but played for laughs” is iffy terrain for me, and this one is no different. I suppose this first run feels a tiny bit fresher than Morressey’s subsequent iterations on the same theme. C-?
“Ill-Met in Lankhmar” by Fritz Leiber (1970). My first exposure to Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser was “Scylla’s Daughter” (read and reviewed in
Modern Classics of Fantasy). I found it corny but entertaining. Each subsequent encounter with them has led to diminishing returns. This entry is no exception. The tale of how the twain first met already feels like the leering self-parody that defines their stories from the 1970s. It isn’t as bad as, say, “Under the Thumbs of the Gods” (read and reviewed in
The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 2), but it reinforces my general disinterest in further Fafhrd and Grey Mouser outings. And it’s inordinately long.
D-?
“Counting the Shapes” by Yoon Ha Lee (2001). It’s strange how Yoon Ha Lee’s early career trajectory matches what I once hoped for my own. Three years older than me, Lee got his first story published in F&SF in 1999, the same year I got my first personalized rejection from Van Gelder. If only I’d been able to study more short fiction and apply myself to my writing, I could have been Lee’s close contemporary, instead of still struggling to make inroads against the current state of the market. Ah well. The point is, I should read more of Lee’s writing. This one is a particularly good start, weaving poetry, magic, and math into remorseless, heartbreaking logic. I would almost call this epic fantasy instead of Sword & Sorcery, flush as it is with politics and worldbuilding deepened with subtle details. A-
“Firebird” by R. Garcia y Robertson (2001). Long ago, my first exposure to Garcia y Robertson was the novel / fixup version of
Firebird. Not familiar with his, ah, idiom, I was intrigued by its Eastern European setting: novel to me then, still somewhat rare in fantasy to this day. I even liked it for the first half or so. But Garcia y Robertson is who he is, which is a relentlessly horny straight guy who never stops asking, “Why don’t we have
naively naked virgins in sci-fi anymore?” (and is adamant that lesbian sex doesn’t count against virginity). I have not been looking forward to this revisit. Fortunately, this novella is the strongest part of
Firebird, rich with natural and cultural detail, and only somewhat leering. Plus, there’s a witch who lives in a hut made of mammoth bones, which will always win points from me.
B-
“Dragon’s Gate” by Pat Murphy (2003). This story exudes atmosphere, expertly interweaving a tremendous sense of place with an analysis of how men use their power to control and take advantage of women. Outstanding. A-
“After the Gaud Chrysalis” by Charles Coleman Finlay (2004). This is my first time reading a story from Finlay, who would, of course, go on to succeed Van Gelder as F&SF’s editor, sending me encouraging rejections when I finally got back into submitting in the mid-2010s. I’m intrigued by the idea of what Finlay called “New Pulp,” and I like the depth of worldbuilding here, which crams a trilogy’s worth of factions and backstory into one novella. The dialogue, though, is too YA-adjacent for my tastes, packed with enough quips and nods and shrugs to make a 2010s-YA-boom fan feel right at home. And if I’m being honest, that very density of worldbuilding can make the pacing feel choppy at times. Still, all in all it’s a solid adventure, and the first story here I’d unhesitatingly label sword & sorcery since “Lankhmar.” B-
“The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death” by Ellen Kushner (1991). Even though it’s been years and years since I last read one of Kushner’s Riverside books, this story was like returning to a warm, familiar second home. The story itself is scarcely an anecdote, and it has absolutely no business being in a sword & sorcery collection. (A secondary world fantasy centering swords is not automatically S&S.) But I enjoyed it. B
“The Island in the Lake” by Phyllis Eisenstein (1998). I keep meaning to read more of Eisenstein’s Alaric stories. The first I ever read was 1977’s “The Land of Sorrow” (read and reviewed
here); the most recent was 2019’s “The City of Lost Desire” (
here). This one falls right in the middle of that extensive span. Like Alaric himself, Eisenstein’s stories are gentle, soft-spoken, and full of heart. This one (while once again having nothing to do with sword & sorcery; it’s courtly low fantasy with an implication of Pern-style space colonization) is charming, start to finish.
A-
“Darkrose and Diamond” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1999). We return to Earthsea for a typically Le Guinian tale: sensitive, empathetic, emotionally deft, beautifully written, and emphatically not sword & sorcery. I loved it, of course. A-
“King Rainjoy’s Tears” by Chris Willrich (2002). Potentially fascinating spin on the “two rogues” template: Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone go through a series of encounters in order to kidnap three beings made from the tears of a king. The story has a solid opening, but the narrative tends toward the scattershot, and too much of its emotional background relies on having read the previous Persimmon and Imago story, which I have not. Still, it’s closer to sword & sorcery than most of the stories in this book. C+
“The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant” by Jeffrey Ford (2000). Turn of the millennium metafiction satirizing the excesses of 1970s grognard fantasy (or, rather, the cultural impression that 1970s grognard fantasy left on wider culture). The story grew from an unpromising beginning; Jeffrey Ford is a sure hand. But humorous fantasy will never be my favorite. C+
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Some excellent stories I’m happy to have finally read, mixed with some disappointments. And a whole lot of tales that had nothing to do with sword & sorcery as I understand it. Expanding the subgenre is fine; watering down the definition to include something like “Darkrose and Diamond” renders the term meaningless.
