Fearsome Journeys

One half of the Swords & Dark Magic team has a new (and ongoing) anthology series featuring stories of military fantasy and swords & sorcery. This May, Jonathan Strahan debuts The Fearsome Journeys: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy. The authors appearing in the launch volume include Trudi Canavan, Elizabeth Bear, Daniel Abraham, Kate Elliott, Saladin Ahmed, Glen Cook, Scott Lynch, Catherynne M. Valente, Ellen Klages, Ellen Kushner & Ysabeau Wilce, Jeffrey Ford, Robert Redick and KJ Parker.

As an enormous fan of swords & sorcery, as well as many of the authors in the inaugural volume, I'll be rooting for this to succeed. Meanwhile, I see that Amazon has the trade paperback of Swords & Dark Magic up for only $6.40 at the moment, if you were tempted to try it out and hadn't done so yet.

The Heirs of Sword and Sorcery

In the September issue of Locus magazine, Gardner Dozois has a favorable review of The Sword & Sorcery Anthology.He recommends it as a good starting point for an introduction to S&S (which it is). However, he does add that the older material is stronger than the newer, which he feels strays into slipstream. He says, "I would have liked to see more stories here from Joe Abercrombie, KJ Parker, Scott Lynch, Steven Erikson, Garth Nix or James Enge, the heirs of the form." Interestingly, all six of these authors are in Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery,which I co-edited with Jonathan Strahan.

Here's an idea: Perhaps they should be read together as unofficial companion volumes.

However, while we're talking about the contemporary heirs of the sword & sorcery mantle, we must give shout outs to Saladin Ahmed, Howard Andrew Jones, Violette Malan, Ari Marmell, Jon Sprunk, Michael J. Sullivan, and Sam Sykes. Likewise, R. A. Salvatore looms large in the field, and I've been very impressed. I've also been mightily impressed with the Pathfinder Talesline of tie-in novels, and much of the short fiction appearing on the e-zine Beneath Ceaseless Skies. We are in something of a renaissance for sword and sorcery. Long may it continue.