Tag Archives: fantasy fiction

261. Andre Nortonʼs Sword Trilogy

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This post and yesterday’s are about the Sword Trilogy, Andre Norton’s first multi-book story. You can read the posts in either order.

Some of Andre Nortonʼs earliest work came during and just after World War II, and today is called the Sword Trilogy. I reviewed the last and best of the three books yesterday. A few are available today in paperback reprints, but the original hardbacks mostly ended up in libraries and command high prices today. Fortunately, all three are available as e-books, if you can tolerate a boat load of typos.

The Sword is Drawn came first in 1944, and was one of Norton’s earliest books; the fifth, if bibliographies can be trusted. My library rescue copy was printed by Oxford University Press, London, 1946, presumably under wartime austerities. It is a slender, ragged volume that needs to be read with a delicate touch.

In a forward to the book, Norton praises the World Friends’ Club for their work in establishing “pen friend” relations between youths of various countries before 1939, and adds:

Now again letters are finding their way by sea and air all round the world. It is possible that in these friendships lies the hope of lasting peace and the vision of a new world.

The four sections of the novel are set off by letters from the young protagonist Lorens van Norries to his American friend Lawrence Kane. Lorens is the grandson of Joris van Norries, head of the House of Norries, renowned jewelers and bankers, but he has been raised as an outcast. In the opening paragraphs, Lorens visits his grandfather’s deathbed and finds that he has been raised away from the family for a reason. His grandfather has foreseen the coming of the Nazis and now entrusts Lorens with the location of the family treasure which he is to dedicate to regaining the Netherland’s freedom. Unfortunately, the Nazi’s are not fooled, and Lorens has to run for his life. He is transported to England by Dutch smugglers, turned underground fighters.

Lorens ends up in Java, still a Dutch possession with a House of Norries presence, and there the war catches up to him again as the Japanese invade. He fights his way through the jungle and ends up fleeing by air toward Australia, where his plane is shot down and he is crippled. Heroes who are physically or emotionally crippled, and fight through anyway seems to be a Norton specialty.

Healed, but unable to fight in the traditional manner, Lorens has an interlude in America where he enlists an underground organization to transport him back into occupied Holland. There he recovers the treasure entrusted to him and uses it to advance the Allied cause.

The Sword is Drawn is a disjointed book, a round-the-world stumble back to where it started. This may be a problem for some readers; I find it a strength, as it mimics the chaos of war. The Sword is Drawn is a moody book, informed by the vision of a people who have been ground down and are still fighting back.

And then the war was over. The second book of the Sword Trilogy, Sword in Sheath,  came out in 1949 and has a mood in stark contrast to the first. Lawrence Kane – sometimes called Kane, sometimes Dutch, but never Larry – and Sam Marusaki, are back from service in WWII which included OSS work. They are called in unofficially, ostensibly to find a missing airman but actually to look for Naziʼs who had gone to earth in the East Indies after the war. Kane is the pen-pal to whom Lorens van Norreys sent all those letters and, sure enough, van Norreys shows up by chapter three, where he and Kane meet face-to-face for the first time. At this meeting we find out that, after the close of the first book, van Norreys spent the remainder of the war in the Dutch underground.

Every verbal exchange between Kane and Sam is couched in light banter, which somehow, unbelievably, still sounds like Norton. Lorens, Kane, and Sam set out on a Dutch tramp steamer to explore the area around the Celebes, where they fall in with Abdul Hakroun, a pirate who is willing to fight Nazis if there is a profit in it for him. Several mysteries entangle them until they find a lost civilization, a missing treasure, and a stranded Nazi sub. All this sounds very predictable for an espionage novel, but Norton’s touch saves it. Still, it is the weakest of the three books.

260. Early Andre Norton: At Sword’s Point

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This is not bait and switch. This week will be devoted to early Nortons, but the news of Fidel Castro’s death makes a few timely words necessary.

This morning I watched some of Castro’s victims being interviewed, people of middle age who were forced to flee their homes as children. Many were still mourning the loss of parents as their families were separated when they fled to America. It begs the question: how can the expulsion of Cubans from Cuba be wrong, and the mass deportation of undocumented American residents be right?

*          *          *          *          *

This post and tomorrow’s are about the Sword Trilogy, Andre Norton’s first multi-book story. The other posts this week are also devoted to very early Nortons.

In my library (spare bedroom) there is a shelf of books on languages, and prominent there is my collection of books on how to teach yourself Dutch or, more properly, Nederlandish. Why Dutch? Why not German which I sort of learned in high school, or Hindi which I kind of learned in college? I could give you logical reasons, but they wouldn’t be honest. The truth is, I fell in love with the Netherlands, and a Norton novel was the cause.

The book was At Sword’ Point. I read it in high school and I re-read it every few years after that until the last library discarded their last copy. Then I bought it used through mail-order. Naturally, it turned out to be a discarded library book. I have it on the desk as I type.

Quinn Anders shivered as he limped up a moss-greened walk to the square New England house and raised his hand to the polished brass eagle doing bored duty as a knocker.

In the first sentence we know that Quinn is not a fire breathing super hero. He shivers. He is also not a perfect physical specimen. He limped. We learn later that he has suffered from polio, a disease common in the era, and that his scholarly nature comes from time spent bedridden as a child. By the time Norton tells us this, we want to know. It is not a narrative intrusion, but an answer to questions she has already teased into our minds.

She also informs us that she is an old fashioned writer, not afraid to use more words than are necessary (the polished brass eagle doing bored duty as a knocker, for God’s sake) and that her writing will be circuitous. That’s Norton. If you don’t like that first sentence, you had better go read someone else.

It worked for that era (and for the multitude of Norton fans). When the novel was published in 1954, the Soviets were consolidating their hold on Eastern Europe and had just detonated their first H bomb. The missile race and the space race were in the near future and escaped Nazis filled popular literature.

Quinn Anders is seeking help in finding out what happened to his older brother, killed in an auto “accident” in the Netherlands. In fact, his brother was part of an unofficial underground, headed by Lorens van Norries, whom you will meet tomorrow; the group came together in resistance to the Nazis, and has changed enemies to resist the Soviets. Quinn goes to  the Netherlands to finish the book his late father began on an obscure order of knights from the Middle Ages. At the same time he is looking for clues to his brother’s death, and to the ancient, gem encrusted porcelain knight that was his brother’s last gift.

He succeeds, of course. No spoiler alert needed for that statement. He also finds himself accepted by a band of like minded adventurers. That is, he finds a family, which is a familiar pattern in Norton, and in young adult literature as a whole.

At Sword’ Point is well plotted and satisfying, but what lifts it above other Norton works is the brooding atmosphere of the Netherlands, half medieval and half modern. I fell in love with the place. It didn’t hurt that Lorens and Kane had had lives of their own in earlier books, which I discovered afterward. You’ll hear about them tomorrow.

257. Who Knows?

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Who knows? Probably the internet.

The internet is science fiction at its best. Back in 1986, when I bought my first Mac, it came with a program called HyperCard. It was a crude, early version of what has now grown to be the internet. It allowed you to create mini-documents called cards and connect them via buttons so you could jump freely from one to another. I dreamed of creating a database of everything I wanted to keep at my fingertips. Then Newton came out – Newton was a proto-tablet that didn’t work very well – and I saw the pair of them as my own personal Tricorder.

Just dreams. Both hardware and software were too crude to be more than a tease, and even a tiny database takes a vast amount of time to create.

Today, the internet does what I dreamed of doing in the days of HyperCard and Newton. I use it to do research for this website. Sometimes I’m looking for things I don’t know, and it works fine for that. Primarily, however, I use it to check details on things I already know.

Here is an example. Years ago I wanted to look again at the Sherlock Holmes quote about furnishing your brain. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here it is:

“You see,” (Holmes) explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has difficulty laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

I thought this was in one of his middle stories. It wasn’t; it was in the first, A Study in Scarlet. To find it, I pulled down my complete Holmes in two volumes and spent an hour looking, but I couldn’t find it. I stumbled across it by accident months later.

So today I did an experiment. I went to my search engine and typed in “brain attic”. It returned a page with ten responses. Six of them referred to the Holmes quote. I opened one, copied and pasted into this post, and you just read it.

Here is another example of finding things I already knew. In my post on The Monkey’s Paw, I wanted to use a quatrain from the Rubaiyat. I knew it well, but not well enough to quote for publication. I didn’t want to spend time getting out my copy and reading through its pages, so I typed a fragment – “dId the hand of the potter shake” – into the search engine and up popped:

After a momentary silence spake
Some Vessel of a more ungainly Make;
“They sneer at me for leaning all awry:
What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?

Notice that I scored a hit even though I had left out “then”.

Earlier today, I was writing about the Lord Darcy stories. I didn’t want to misspell Randall Garrett’s name (How many Ls, how many Rs, how many Ts?) so I typed it into the search engine and got my correct spelling along with a great deal of additional material that I didn’t need.

That I didn’t need at the moment, that is, but information that will be there when I do need it. Like I said at the top, the internet is science fiction at its best.

243. On Fantasy: Archaism

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Marion Zimmer Bradley is well known for her fantasies, but she cut her teeth on science fiction. Her Darkover series was a massive best seller in its day. Darkover is a planet in our universe, populated by humans from a stranded starship, whose powers of the mind come (quite scientifically) from the pollen of psychotropic plants and from interbreeding with non-human natives. Lost and out of contact with their technological roots, they evolve a feudal society. They create an archaic world from a purely science fiction starting point.

Of course this is a reductionist view of a complex and massive series of novels and short stories. But it makes the point that archaism in fantasy is easy to achieve. You could almost write a formula:

HORSES + SWORDS + MAGIC = FANTASY

Of course it takes more than that to achieve good fantasy.

The time before known time is an ancient idea. Atlantis and Mu fit into it. Tolkien’s Middle Earth came before recorded history. So did the world of Conan. The worlds of Michael Moorcock seem to be of this nature, but a closer reading will have to follow them sideways in time. Alternate histories allow access to archaic worlds coexisting with our modern world. We can go to other 2016s, where the Native Americans are the only Americans, or Rome still rules, or Muhammed became an atheist. Take your pick, and if you can’t find what you like, you can write your own.

Remnant stories also let the past live on. Professor Challenger found dinosaurs still living deep in the Amazon. Hilton’s characters found Shangri-La. Even Rick Brant, in the favorite series from my childhood, found a lost remnant of an earlier age hidden in the Himalayas in The Lost City.

You could go sideways in time, or backward, or to some lost valley and find dystopian, crowded cities, but that almost never happens. Archaism is about escaping modernity, crowding, complication, and life in cities. Back to simpler times. Back to the good old days. Back to the land of childhood. Back to the middle ages where knights in shiny armor rode pretty horses and rescued damsels with big bosoms and pearly teeth from dastardly villains – or dragons.

Does anybody believe this? Of course not. Does anybody want to believe? Of course. And in the friction generated when those two truths rub together, the fire of archaism is born.

So our hero goes back (or sideways) and he/she finds the land of her/his heart’s desire and it isn’t what she/he expected at all. But it isn’t bad. There are problems to overcome, heartaches to endure, and villainy to face, but so what? That’s true in Portland, and Austin, and New York City as well. In the new/old world  there are beauties and wonders, in addition to troubles. And it’s probably green, with trees and meadows, even if it also has rain and snow instead of eternal sunshine.

Above all, there aren’t any traffic jams. And the cell phone never rings.

Wait a minute. I’ll get my backpack, and we can go.

242. On Fantasy: Language

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Up sword, sayeth Sir Gallant, lest I cleave thee where thou standest.

Yeah, that’s pretty bad, and it has been a long time since I’ve seen that kind of fake-ancient language used in fantasy, except as a joke.

Language in fantasy is both a necessary tool, and a dangerous one. You can’t just throw in some thees and thous and -ests, but you also can’t speak in modern, colloquial English. Simple formality is the easiest way out. Even Zelazny, for all his smart-ass-with-a-sword characters, wrote with intelligence and a great deal of formality. If you want your characters to speak slang, you have to invent slang appropriate to their world, and that takes some effort.

Remember, whatever language your characters speak, even if you are setting your fantasy in early England, no one on Earth speaks that language today. In my fantasy world of the Menhir there are three languages in play, and a mid-sea island has a bastard language drawn from all three. It doesn’t matter. The book gets translated into English, whatever language the characters are speaking.

Whatever your genre, you are likely to have characters from different levels of society. Whether you are writing about nomads from the desert encountering the Pasha of Nevermore, or a Bostonian talking to a southern slave in 1845, you need to find a way to make your characters sound different from modern America, and from each other, but still be comprehensible. And it needs to sound natural. ‘Taint easy.

Languages – note the difference – are also dangerous, but at least you don’t have to invent one if you don’t want to. Tolkien did, to a degree far in excess of the needs of his stories. Almost no one else ever does.

I did, in a manner of speaking. The Menhir stories grew from a single image, and I had no idea for years where they were going. Things got invented, and the world of the Menhir grew by accretion. I invented a style of fighting, which required invention of a sword/lance, which required invention of a name, and lancette entered my story’s vocabulary. A thousand place names and personal names got invented. Gradually, the world grew a religious background which became the underpinning for what passes for magic on the world. This morphed into an entire system for the handling of life and death, and words like ai, enreithment, and abahara entered the vocabulary of the story. I invented a kind of peasant dwelling and now we had hartwa. My people started out with oxen and horses but that wasn’t satisfactory so they were soon riding kakais and using tichan to pull their wagons.

Words begat words, morphographically. Since ai means power and dzi– means man of, then a dziai is a man of power, and the men of the plains whose entire lives revolve around their mounts are, of course, the dzikakai.

As if that weren’t enough, my people started quoting words and phrases from the language of a nearby kingdom; just like the English quote the French, n’est-ce pas. I eventually made myself a glossary, but don’t take that as a requirement. I’ve been living on the world of the Menhir, part time at least, for four decades, but even I get confused sometimes.

**      **       **

I’ve told this story before, but I can’t leave the subject of language in fantasy without repeating it. The scene, as I recall, was Westercon 33, Los Angeles, in 1980. A panel of writers and editors was discussing fantasy, and things had gotten out of hand. After a grueling discussion of what some magical breed of horses in Lord of the Rings ate, they had moved on to the subject of archaic language. Somebody said it was okay, but don’t overdo it. Somebody said archaisms should be used sparingly, like spice in food. That went back and forth for several minutes until some wag in the audience stood up and asked, “Are you saying we can have archaic, and eat it too?”

I wish I had thought of that.

241. On Fantasy: Magic

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Clarke’s third law.

The universe is full of forces; some of those forces are personalities.
reference lost

I believe that the second quotation above is from a piece by James Blish, which I read many years ago and no longer have available to me. If anyone recognizes the source, let me know. In that same piece, I believe, he spoke of Black Easter as an experiment in which he treated the Book of Revelation as simple fact. Roger Zelazny made a career out of treating non-Western religions as if they were simple fact.

Like stardrives, magic can be highly structured or haphazardly thrown in when the story needs it. Both styles work, depending on the skill of the author. The most organized magic I recall is Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories. For disorganization, see any new author.

A primary, underlying question in any presentation of a fantasy world is, “Where does the magic come from?” Is it a dispersed, readily available natural resource like The Force in Star Wars? Does it reside within its wielder, and a natural consequence of his being? Or is it owned by other powerful beings, who must be supplicated or bargained with to obtain a portion of their power? This choice has a huge effect on how dark the story is likely to become.

Christianity, in earlier centuries, saw witches as wielders of power which they obtained by pacts with Satan. Harmful as they were, they had no power of their own. In many dark fantasies, the searcher after power obtains his heart’s desire from some greater being who is, in essence, a Satanic stand-in. Such Faustian bargains never end well.

Magic, in fantasy writing, often goes unexplained. The talisman in The Monkey’s Paw is understood by the reader without elaboration, just as a reader of westerns doesn’t need an explanation of how a six gun works.

It is quite usual for a fantasy hero to have inborn power. Harry Potter was a wizard born of wizards. Ged is an unknown until his power is discovered by a mage. Corwin is a son of Amber.

It is equally usual to concentrate on the education of a wizard, or mage, or dziai. Ged went to Roke; Harry Potter went to Hogwarts, and my Tidac took two books to learn how to use his power because he had no mentor. His father never learned, and it destroyed him.

Can we have fantasy without magic? Pavane is an alternate universe science fiction or an alternate history novel, but its tone makes it read like fantasy, except for the absence of magic. What seems to be magic in one chapter, may just be a dying dream; it isn’t made clear to the reader. For me, this places Pavane on the borderline between genres.

On the other hand, Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories are all about magic, but their system of magic is so comprehensively worked out that they read like science fiction.

I know that my Menhir story, in its infancy, read like a quasi-medieval world. Slowly I came to grips with how the powers of every soul are affixed to menhirs at death, making menhirs into gestalt sentient beings which become repositories of power that can be tapped, at peril, by men of power. Only then did magic come into the world of the menhir. And only then did it begin to read as fantasy.

240. On Fantasy: Tone

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Menhir, introduced last Thursday, is presented in two novel length chunks – Valley of the Menhir and Scourge of Heaven – but it is one story just as the three parts of Lord of the Rings are one story. The Morning of the Gods is a short prolog featuring characters who set things in motion, but are not before us throughout the work. One, although central to the plot, stays in the background through most of the books, and the other dies early.

The tone of this prolog is intense and serious, but it can afford to be. It only lasts eight ms pages; if it were prolonged, such seriousness would quickly become pretentious. Books, like the characters in them, need to breathe. This is true whatever the genre.

J. R. R Tolkien set the tone for tone in fantasy, and not necessarily for the best. The combination of pretension and childishness that came from mixing hobbits with humans and elves was, for me, an uneasy mix. I liked Lord of the Rings well enough to read it twice, decades apart, but I don’t think I could make it through again. To be fair, the hobbits were the best thing in the books. When I tried to read the Silmarillion, the less the hobbits were there to lighten the mood, the harder I found it to read, until I finally bogged down and quit.

Tone at its best is found in A Wizard of Earthsea, which is, for my taste, and without equivocation, the best fantasy novel of them all. The overriding factor in the tone of Earthsea is humility. Ged is the son of peasants (or Earthsea’s equivalent) and he never loses touch with his humble beginnings. True, his arrogance leads to tragedy, but the bulk of the book is the story of Ged regaining the humility which is his natural state.

The language of the book is simple, matching the tone of the story. The image of a man in a tiny boat, pursuing his nemesis alone across Earthsea, has an almost Ghandiesque simplicity about it – if we remember that Ghandi had the simplicity and arrogance to bring down the British empire.

Tone can take many shades in fantasy, and still work. Fritz Leiber’s Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser stories on one hand and Keith Robert’s Pavane on the other are worlds apart in every way, but each strikes the tone necessary for its story. And yes, I know Pavane is an alternate worlds novel, but it reads as a fantasy.

Roger Zelazny’s tone has one foot in science fiction and the other in fantasy. It doesn’t matter what he writes, his tone remains the same, and it works everywhere. Lord of Light is certainly science fiction and Creatures of Light and Darkness is certainly fantasy. Amber, in all its volumes, transcends categorization, but all these works belong in the genre called everything-Zelazny-wrote. I’ve read all his work repeatedly, and will continue to do so, because I get lost in the sound of his voice. And that is what tone is, after all.

239. Morning of the Gods

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Not counting fragments, dead ends, and works in progress, I have written nine novels. Three were science fiction; two were published and one is in the process of being published, so this blog had concentrated most heavily on that genre. Three others were more or less contemporary, a survival novel, a mystery adventure (now on display over in Serial), and a novel on teaching, a bit of which appeared in Serial last Christmas time.

You wouldn’t know it from this blog, but I have spent more time and effort, and more of my soul, on three novels of fantasy than on all my other efforts combined. It’s time to give them a moment in the sun. Here is the opening of Valley of the Menhir, a prolog called Morning of the Gods.

**       **       **

Other lands; other skies.  Not of earth. Lands of red sky and green sea; or gray sky and silver forests. Lands and peoples as endless as the sand, and as nameless. Realities shifting into one another, slipping by like images glimpsed in a nightride through chaos.

Out there in the night that stretches away from us all – there where consciousness ends; where experience missed sets an iron boundary on our lives – there is a land of red sky and green sea, Poinaith, and another land where the gray sky leans down to lock hands with the sliver elfin forest. 

And there is a land that has no name. We will call it the World of the Menhir. Although menhirs are found on many worlds – they are, in fact, the gateways between worlds – on no other world are the fates of its people so intertwined with their menhirs.

The World of the Menhir was temporarily Godless. Certainly, there were plenty of ways to worship. Piety was great among the people, but the last real Gods had departed a thousand years ago. All that was about to change.

In the land of red sky, two riders came, the one skirting the water’s edge and throwing up a spray of spindrift, the other riding some paces inland and throwing up a spray of creamy sand.

The foremost rider, Rem Ossilo, drew rein and his mount Margyr shook its head in rebellion at ending its run. Hea Santala’s mount closed the distance between them and they cantered inland to the cliff base and the path that wound upward. Switchbacking single file, Rem Ossilo in the lead, they ascended the cliff to a rounded, grassy hill. The sea was green beneath them, hurling itself against the headland beneath a rusty sky.

At the top Rem dismounted to look back. There was no pursuit – yet. Hea Santala’s gaze followed his. Though her face was lined with sadness and his with anger, there was no mistaking the commonality of that gaze. It was a last looking, drawing in memories for an uncertain future, hoarding a moment out of time to nourish them in exile.

Rem Ossilo gazed long at the distance, first assuring himself of their temporary safety, then taking in the panorama of his homeland. That was his way. Hea Santala took in all things at once, loving the land and fearing her enemies in the same unwavering gaze. Even hating her enemies somewhat, not for their animosity, but because she must leave this land. That was her way.

Rem looked then at his wife; that there was still some affection in his glance was a tribute to her, not to him. In the distance there was a hint of dust. She raised a finger to point, saying, “Our children are coming.”

For a moment every light emotion left his face, and it was as if someone had opened the gates of hell. Then hell turned icy and he turned away from the sea, remounting and urging Margyr toward the jumble of menhirs that surmounted the hillock. Hea Santala followed without comment. All her life she had followed without comment, and that had been her undoing.

**       **       **

That’s the last you’ll see of Poinaith as Rem and Hea pass into exile in another world, the world of the Menhir, where Valley of the Menhir will properly begin five generations later.

238. The Worst Story

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The Worst Story Ever Told

The rest of this week and all of next are devoted to fantasy. It’s a fluid category. In one sense, everything is fantasy. Science fiction almost always has some outré element, and it usually deals with science or engineering which hasn’t been invented yet, and probably never will be in the “real” world. The Iliad and the Odyssey are predicated on believing that the Gods are real. So is Pilgrim’s Progress, The Scarlet Letter, and most American fiction written before 1950.

We just need is a simple definition which separates science fiction from fantasy, so we can compare apples with apples. It probably doesn’t exist, but I’m going to throw something into the pond just to stir up the water.

Science fiction stories tell us to ask for the stars.
Fantasy stories tell us to be careful what we ask for.

**       **       **

The Gods have always told us to be careful what we ask for, and most men, frightened, have complied. A few have had the courage to complain, at least in poetry and song. Leonard Cohen, in Bird on a Wire, said:

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch,
He said to me, “You must not ask for so much.”
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door,
She cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?”

Khayyam in the Rubiyat, using pots as metaphors for human beings, said:

After a momentary silence spake
Some vessel of a more ungainly make:
  “They sneer at me for leaning all awry;
What! did the hand, then, of the Potter shake?”

**       **       **

Of those who knuckled under and said, “Be careful what you ask for,” no one has written a more damnable story than W.W. Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw. Morally, that is. As a piece of fiction, it is superb. As an apology for the status quo, no one has done better. That is to say, no one has done worse.

“Without, the night was cold and wet.” So the story begins. Mr. White and his son are playing chess when Sergeant-Major Morris, back from India, comes visiting and tells the tale of a talisman, enspelled by a fakir, which grants three wishes to three men. The holy man “wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow.”

The first man had his three wishes. Morris does not know what the first two were, but the third was for death. Morris then had his three wishes, but he won’t discuss them. He hurls the talisman into the fire, but Mr. White recovers it and . . .

No, I can’t tell you any more. It’s all too horrible.

(But you can click the link above and read for yourself.)

Of course not all fantasy fits my baiting definition, and much that is not fantasy, does. I’m just poking the beast with a stick, because every time I read something that says, “Be careful what you ask for,” I am once again infuriated by the propaganda of surrender.

Contents of the First Year of Serial

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On August 31, 2015 – one year ago today – I began this website in two parts, A Writing Life and Serial. Confusingly, the name of the overall site and one of the two blogs was the same. I wouldn’t make that mistake again, but there were many things I didn’t know about running a website when I started.

This half of the site, Serial, is technically a separate blog, but it isn’t treated like a blog. It was a way to let me publish short stories, articles, novels, and novel excerpts in serial form. I always intended to remove the results, as each was completed, to a separate section called Backfile. Blogs place entries last to first; that works for a serial, but for a completed piece it would mean reading from end to beginning.  In Backfile you can read from beginning to end.

Here is a summary of the first year of Serial.

Blondel of Arden     Blondel is a peaceful, small statured bard of small magics, but he is also more than he seems. Blondel of Arden and Prince of Exile are my only non-Menhir fantasies. Look for it in Backfile.

Koan     Short and snarky. Look for it in Backfile.

Into the Storm     A day’s recreation with strong undertones. Look for it in Backfile.

To Go Not Gently     Ram David Singh, formerly of Ozarka, NorAm, now of India, the last, great scientific country on a post-apocalyptic Earth, is trying for immortality. Lots of luck. Novella, originally published in Galaxy, a modified excerpt from the novel A Fond Farewell to Dying. Look for it in Backfile.

The Best of Lies     Selenchuk came to slay a dragon and stayed to live a quiet life. Now another would-be dragon slayer is about to mess that up. Set in the World of the Menhir. Look for it in Backfile.

How To Build a Culture     Non-fiction.  The is the text of a talk given at Westercon 34, held in Sacramento, CA  in 1981. Look for it in Backfile.

Symphony Christmas     This is as excerpt from the novel Symphony in a Minor Key.  I still intend to publish the novel, so this will eventually be removed from Serial and not placed in Backfile.

Over the Christmas season I printed five favorite poems, written by others. They will eventually be removed from Serial and not placed in Backfile.

The Prince of Exile     Nothing is what it seems, in service of the Prince. Prince of Exile and Blondel of Arden are my only non-Menhir fantasies. Not yet moved to Backfile.

Voices in the Walls     This is as excerpt from an uncompleted novel, heavily annotated for the benefit of new or would-be writers. It will eventually be removed from Serial and placed in Backfile.

Jandrax     The entirety of my 1978 first novel, annotated for the benefit of would-be writers. It will eventually be removed from Serial and placed in Backfile.

Starting tomorrow, Raven’s Run, another unpublished novel.