Swords Against Wizardry by Fritz Leiber

This entry is part 5 of 23 in the series 2023 Reads

As always, I’m posting a little after finishing the book in question. In this case, just a day after. Incidentally, the volume I’m reading from is the one I used in the header, the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks edition of The First Book of Lankhmar, but I’m counting it as four separate “books” because, hey, humor me. I have a kid, I’m slow and it makes me feel a bit better about my limited reading progress! (And that is how these collections were originally published.) I’ve been reading all the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser books in slow motion, it seems. I …

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Magic, Science, Inconsistency, and the Principle of Acceptable Variance

I’m enjoying Jim Baker’s The Cunning Man’s Handbook, an exhaustive look at the practices of the cunning folk in England (and to some degree America) from 1550-1900, which I’m reading as research for the book I’m writing now (which has a cunning woman as a major character). Baker’s text is full of (ie. basically, completely composed of) countless examples of what folk magic involved in different moments during modern English history, and it also has lots of interesting observations on how much of what neo-pagans claim as history is actually just “invented tradition” (in the sense that Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger discuss in The …

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Swords Against Death by Fritz Leiber

Swords Against Death is the second of Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar books, featuring the archetypal characters of Fafhrd  the barbarian and The Grey Mouser the rogue. The book includes stories spanning from 1940 to 1970… which I imagine, if you’re reading the book attentively and know this, would leave you watching for signs of change and development in the author’s writing style. As for me, it wasn’t really apparent to me, as I read the stories, that they were written across such a long span of years. That isn’t to say there weren’t shifts in tone and style, or that there …

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