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A Rose by Any Other Name
a Firebrand Fiction Review by Robert J. Santa
Fantasy is, by far, the staple of the speculative fiction industry. Not that other genre fiction doesn't hold up its end, merely that fantasy has so many diverse sub-categories that it becomes easy to put stories that might otherwise end up as horror or even science fiction under a fantasy heading. Urban fantasy, sword and sorcery, high fantasy, magic realism, dark fantasy, slipstream - since they all involve a fantastic element, they can be covered by the largest umbrella in fiction writing.
Which is why one reader's fantasy might be another reader's least favorite writing, and the purpose of this review: to examine what could be considered opposite ends of the fantasy market.
It has been a few years since I picked up an issue of Realms of Fantasy. The June 2006 issue is as professionally presented as any magazine, and it has long been the frontrunner in fantasy markets. The reason I have not read Realms of Fantasy in some time is that, while I still enjoyed the writing between the pages, I came away from each issue like it was not tailored to my tastes as closely as some other markets were. I wanted to revisit this magazine with fresh eyes, and I am glad I did. While my expectations were that I would have to brace myself for cover-to-cover soft, emotional fiction (and most of the fiction met this expectation), three standout pieces made the purchase price worth every penny.
Realms of Fantasy is not all about fiction. This issue held articles about Stephen King short stories brought to television, an evolution of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game from the tabletop to the online world, and book reviews. The best article, however, was a six-page examination of the werewolf in literature and movies by Kit Whitfield. Where vampire fiction has Dracula as its genesis, and the mad scientist archetype is found in Dr. Frankenstein, the legend of a wolfman arose not from popular fiction but folktales, and Whitfield explores this in great and interesting detail.
The lead fiction piece is "Robin of the Green" by A. C. Wise, beautifully illustrated in a two-page impressionist oil work by Tom Kidd. The story takes an interesting twist in that Robin himself is not a nobleman taken to hiding but a powerful forest spirit (he calls himself a god). Sir Guy comes to the forest to tell Robin that he is marrying Marion and to beg him to stay away. Selfishly, Robin doesn't, and the story moves toward a resolution where the sympathetic Guy and the thoroughly unsympathetic Robin become more like their familiar icons. I feel Wise chose these characters because of their established history, almost as a convenience, so that backstory wouldn't have to be written. It didn't seem that they needed to be Robin Hood and Sir Guy; it could have just as easily been a new forest spirit and a rival. This may seem like a petty criticism, but the well-written story seemed marred by a misuse of commas in complex sentences that became overwhelmingly distracting. Aside from that, this is a very good story that holds all the aforementioned soft, emotional style that I had come to associate with Realms of Fantasy, and I did, in fact, brace myself for more to come.
Which is why I was staggered by the ugliness of "Pavel Petrovich" by Daniel Hood, a story about the eponymous character narrated by a fellow Soviet prisoner spending their years in a forest gulag. Pavel, a "bumpkin" from "beyond the beyond - way out by the Bering Straits, one of those places where people don't say what town they're from, they say what region," who arrives at the prison for assaulting a government official, is immediately beset by violence and pain at the hands of prison gangs. Pavel defends himself to extremes, so much so that he is eventually left to his own devices. He speaks of mysticism that is dismissed by the narrator and his fellow inmates, hunts mice and rabbits with ease, and refuses to be tattooed as is prison custom because of the magic it holds. The ending seemed an obvious manifestation of the beginning and middle of the piece, yet it is so well done and with such dramatic writing, that I practically rushed to see what I knew was coming. Yet for all its incredible storytelling, this piece is not the best in the magazine.
That distinction goes to "Schwarze Madonna and the Sandalwood Knight" by Ruth Nestvold and Jay Lake. In the opening paragraphs we are introduced to the Black Madonna, a merciless killer of men. She comes upon a young farmer "who had no womenfolk to protect him." The farmer is singing a song, and this entrances the Black Madonna who is surprised by a red knight who decapitates her. The knight rides off with the head as a trophy, leaving the farmer to bury the corpse.
Some years later, the farmer digs up the sword of the Black Madonna and walks off to seek her head. He has fallen in love with her, speaking to her grave every day. Calling himself Robert the Brown, he walks with ghosts and fey in his wake. When he comes upon the burned remains of a town, he offers to carry the township's wrongs with him and add them to the one he already plans to right.
The mayor stared a moment. "You are a knight, sir?"
"No." Behind Robert, the invisible fey rustled in laughing commerce with his attendant ghosts. The mayor stirred at their noise, as if he could half-hear. "I am a man with a sword."
This self-made - though modestly untitled - hero strides through a world of wonder that few writers could bring to vision. This is a marvelous tale of love and redemption, disguised as a tale of vengeance, with an ending that mocks its own suspense when the protagonist wonders aloud what will happen. I admit of all the possibilities, I did not expect Nestvold and Lake to chose the one they did. I cannot say enough about the writing in this piece, crafted as if every sentence was brilliantly agonized over by the authors. It would not surprise me in the least to see this story nominated for recognition, though the presence of a sword and a knight virtually dooms it in this regard.
Less exciting tales were "Undine" by Catherine Krabe, "Sister of the Hedge" by Jim C. Hines, "A Better Place" by Josh Roundtree and "Ice" by Patrice E. Sarath. All four of these pieces fell short of the mark for me, probably because there seemed no real conflict that the protagonists overcame. Krabe makes a wholly sympathetic character in Nadine, an Olympic hopeful swimmer severely injured in a car accident, yet Nadine spends the entirety of the story complaining about her lot in life instead of seeing how fortunate she is to still be alive (though her mother tells her this often). Roundtree shows us a West Texas farm where one brother accepts his life as a farmer and one rejects it, to be taken by a mysterious man who walks out of a sandstorm. That brother is never seen again. How does it affect the other brother who freely confesses at the story's conclusion that he wouldn't go with the sandman fifty years later after a life of drudgery? Hines' retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fable from a strange and twisted new angle began as an excitingly dark premise and ended with a near-suicidal protagonist who did nothing to change her environment, even when given the opportunity. Sarath's haunted hockey player just didn't connect with me enough to make his struggle against an oddly-confusing enemy seem like the ending truly resolved his conflicts. And I certainly wasn't expecting the F-bomb to get dropped in there, not in Realms of Fantasy.
All in all, I found the presence of two stories and one article more than offset the others that I found lacking. With a price tag of $3.99, paid for by plentiful advertising, this is a very good value.
I am compelled to comment on the cover, however. There is a misunderstanding in the speculative fiction community about the illustrations used as cover art, in that they do not generally match the contents between the pages. Cover art is marketing, to be sure, so that a cover displaying a brawny barbarian slaying a demonic mob may have nothing to do with the kinds of stories found inside. Realms of Fantasy, of late, has used illustrations of women in fantastic settings, more in line with what I feel is their preferred type of fantasy. However, boldly written on the cover of the June 2006 issue is "7 All New Fantasy Stories: Wizards, Warriors, Faeries, and More!" Perhaps the dapper gentleman in the flawless suit who walks out of the sandstorm in "A Better Place" is a wizard; Pavel might be, but I doubt it. Certainly Robert of the Brown is a warrior, though he engages in no swordplay. Maybe the water creature in "Undine" is a faerie. Who knows? The wording on the cover, especially the exclamation point, made it seem that the stories inside this issue would be more high fantasy than modern. It is, at the least, misleading, and at the most, a grossly deceiving marketing ploy. I did not expect something that I would find on the cover of Cosmopolitan to be on Realms of Fantasy.
If Realms of Fantasy is soft, then Flashing Swords is titanium. This is no holds barred, down and dirty, action-oriented fantasy in a style that is reminiscent of pulp magazines of the first half of the twentieth century. I will freely confess that the kind of fiction offered by Flashing Swords is the kind that I have been dabbling in as a writer of late. It is not intended to be merely escapist fiction, though certainly the sword and sorcery genre has been burdened with that impression. There is no standard that says a story filled with action is empty of any other meaning.
Which is why I was shocked by the absence of action in the opening story for Flashing Swords #6, "A Covenant with Death" by James Enge. The opening began with the excitement I expected to see: an attack by a poisonous lizard on the protagonist. What follows is paragraph after paragraph of either back-story or dialog, as the main characters find evidence of and then discuss the presence of a unicorn hunter. It is not until the very end where the hunter is discovered, though the story rushes forward with compelling prose. The conflict of stopping the hunter from slaying a unicorn is talked about often and is the driving force of the story's conclusion, yet this conflict is never resolved. I left this piece disappointed and confused that it was the lead in a market that specializes in action and adventure, but I want to point out that this was my only disappointment. Possibly it was a failed expectation, or that I had higher hopes. The story itself is very well done, merely different than what I thought it was going to be.
A more typical offering was "The Gray Mother" (curiously spelled "grey" in the story) by Steve Goble. This piece featured Calthus, a recurring character to Flashing Swords. With his warrior's perspective, grasses are not merely waving but "saw-sharp" and "stood like sharp pikes planted in the ground." Calthus is all anticipatory deadliness, and the fight with a pack of wolves is described in a simplicity of style that is difficult to master, evident throughout the entire piece. Where some might linger on how the day began with a gentle tinting of the once-black sky and the quietude of the birds not yet awakened by the dawn, Goble writes "Morning came, breezeless." Other writers, this one included, are envious of his talent.
So too must they be of Harold Lamb. I had never heard of him, for his work has been out of print for decades. It is being resurrected by Flashing Swords and elsewhere, and those that read this type of fantasy are the better for it. "An Edge to a Sword" also has as its only action the ending, yet everything from start to finish is filled with a desperate haste that impels the reader forward, as if the pages all slanted downhill. It is the tale of a mysterious Cossack who arrives in a village thirsty as the tavern keeper dawdles.
"Dog of the ----!" growled the Cossack, his black eyes seeking us out. "Good sirs, did you ever see the like? Here a Christian knight who has smoked his pipe in the mosques of Constantinople must go with a dry gullet at the pleasure of this mid-wife!"
Ayub is the Cossack who takes up residence in the town. He makes himself a friend to all, even as a potential husband to the narrator's cousin. When new arrivals threaten the town's and Ayub's existence, he takes arms against them. Then the story's true meaning is revealed, and the reader is reminded that it is being retold through the narrator from his uncle. It is an outstanding storytelling device worthy of accolades. No wonder the folks at Flashing Swords are making efforts to revive Lamb's work.
Vying for a position as the best story of the group with Lamb's offering is S. C. Bryce's "The Dragon's Scale." This first of a two-part story is about another recurring character, Dermanassian, a desert elf of considerable brains, weapon skill, and magic. Charged by a god to recover a scale from the white dragon, Dermanassian uses stealth to observe and enter the dragon's lair, eventually being discovered. Dragon and elf strike up both conversation and bargain, with the inevitable combat ensuing. The dialog is quick and clever, the action more so. Even though this story could be considered well ended here, I relish the next issue of Flashing Swords to see part two.
But if you are searching for a classic feel to sword and sorcery, look no further than "God of the Catacombs" by Trey Causey. This tale opens with a swordsman trapped in the inky black of a cavern, fleeing persecution, engaged in mortal combat with the humanoids that dwell in the dark. Another struggle follows this until the hero, Zakoji, encounters a woman who drives away the denizens. She speaks his language, displays great power, and shows him the exit from the cavern as she also does the title character. Dark in both setting and tone, with crisp action sequences, a rough and tumble protagonist, the requisite gorgeous female, and a Lovecraftian presence, "God of the Catacombs" is certainly what Flashing Swords is all about.
Rounding out the collection are "The Gods Have Left Us" by Paul Jessup and "The Dead God's Punishment" by Robert Burke Richardson, two finely-crafted adventure tales. While I did not single these pieces out for comment, it is more for brevity's sake than anything else. These are first rate stories that deserved to see publication.
What is perhaps best about Flashing Swords is that it is an online publication, free to anyone who enjoys sword and sorcery. I do consider reading on the screen less enjoyable than reading a printed magazine in my favorite chair, but this is a small gripe for a market that puts out such quality adventure fiction.
There can be no doubt that readers who prefer only the type of material found in Realms of Fantasy would not for a second enjoy that found in Flashing Swords, just as it's safe to say that the reverse is also true. However, if there is a reader that enjoys both - as I do, when done well - then these two publications come highly recommended. They do what they do very well.
Dare I say, fantastic?
Robert J. Santa
Firebrand Fiction Reviews: all content © 2006, Robert J. Santa
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