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Sword & Planet Kindle Edition
SCIENCE FICTION? FANTASY? IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR BOTH?
The distant future—like the distant past—is a place of myths, of legends, and of great heroes. Cyborg knights battle extraterrestrial demons to rescue a peaceful village. A young girl unlocks an ancient power to protect her world from offworld colonists. Here are stories not where magic is science, but with magic and science. Not knights and castles, but knights and starships. Wizards and ray guns. Swords and planets.
In D.J. Butler’s “Power and Prestige,” a pair of two-bit mercenaries are hired to solve a murder in a labyrinth beneath a crumbling city at the end of time. A young knight must face down an alien menace and awaken the power within in R.R. Virdi’s “A Knight Luminary,” and in “Saving the Emperor” Simon R. Green takes us deep into the Imperial City of Virimonde . . . and offers a glimpse at how the Deathstalker clan rose to power and fame.
Enjoy tales from Tim Akers, Jessica Cluess, L.J. Hachmeister, Susan R. Matthews, T.C. McCarthy, Jody Lynn Nye, and Tom Toner; a new world from Warhammer 40,000 author Peter Fehervari; and a new chapter in the Sun Eater saga from Christopher Ruocchio.
Contributors:
Tim Akers
D.J. Butler
Jessica Cluess
Peter Fehervari
Simon R. Green
L.J. Hachmeister
Susan R. Matthews
T.C. McCarthy
Jody Lynn Nye
Christopher Ruocchio
Tom Toner
R.R. Virdi
At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).
About Star Destroyers, coedited by Christopher Ruocchio:
“. . . spectacular space battles and alien contacts . . . themes of military ethics, the uses of artificial intelligence, and the limits of the capacity of the human mind. . . . it is the human interactions and decisions that ultimately drive the stories. . . . will appeal to fans of military and hard science fiction and any readers fascinated by the possibilities of space travel.”—Booklist
“. . . stories of giant spaceships at war, at peace, and in the often-gray areas between. . . . a worthy addition to a long tradition of ship-based fiction, and its authors portray captains, arcane astrogators, and civilian child passengers with equal depth. It’s recommended for fans of military SF and space adventure.”—Publishers Weekly
“. . . you’d probably expect some tight, action-filled space opera stories of giant space battles . . . and there’s some of that. But there are also espionage stories, rescue missions, political conflicts, alternate histories, even a few humorous tales. . . . each author took the premise in a different direction . . . if I had to identify one common feature to all the stories, it would be that they’re all fun. . . . Like it says, big ships blowing things up. What’s not to like?”—Analog
Christopher Ruocchio is the author of The Sun Eater, a space opera fantasy series, as well as the Assistant Editor at Baen Books, where he has edited several anthologies. He is a graduate of North Carolina State University, where he studied English Rhetoric and the Classics. Christopher has been writing since he was eight and sold his first novel, Empire of Silence, at twenty-two. To date, his books have been published in five languages.
Christopher lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his wife, Jenna.
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateDecember 7, 2021
- File size753 KB
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Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Christopher lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his wife, Jenna. --This text refers to the mass_market edition.
Product details
- ASIN : B09M8ZCY2G
- Publisher : Baen Books; 1st edition (December 7, 2021)
- Publication date : December 7, 2021
- Language : English
- File size : 753 KB
- Simultaneous device usage : Unlimited
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 412 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #896,735 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #10,756 in Science Fiction Adventure
- #19,201 in Science Fiction Adventures
- #60,048 in Fantasy (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Tim Akers was born in deeply rural North Carolina, the only son of a theologian. He moved to Chicago for college, where he lives with his wife. He splits his time between databases and fountain pens.
Amazon bestselling author and editor L. J. Hachmeister writes and fights - although she tries not to do them at the same time. L. J. is a world champion stick-fighter, a black belt in Doce Pares Eskrima and Taekwondo, and a brown belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, but maintains that no opponent is as daunting as the last 30% of a manuscript.
L. J. is a cross-genre author under the umbrella of science fiction/fantasy. Her Cuban roots and LGBTQA+ ties greatly impact her writing, as well as her career as a registered nurse. However, her love for rescuing puppies and working with charity organizations drives her passion to succeed as an author so she can continue to give to those in need. L. J. is an avid sponsor for "Lifeline Puppy Rescue."
Sign-up for L. J.'s monthly newsletter for story updates and photos of the rescued puppies: https://www.triorion.com/contact-us/
Website: www.triorion.com
Dave (D.J.) Butler writes adventure stories for all readers. He has been a lawyer, a consultant, and a corporate trainer. His interests include languages, guitar, hanging out with his wife and kids, astronomy, and history.
Sign up to get updates about Dave and his books here: http://davidjohnbutler.com/mailinglist/
R.R. Virdi is a USA Today Bestselling author, two-time Dragon Award finalist, and a Nebula Award finalist. He is the author of two urban fantasy series, The Grave Report, and The Books of Winter. The author of the LitRPG/portal fantasy series, Monster Slayer Online. And the author of a space western/sci fi series, Shepherd of Light. He has worked in the automotive industry as a mechanic, retail, and in the custom gaming computer world. He's an avid car nut with a special love for American classics.
The hardest challenge for him up to this point has been fooling most of society into believing he's a completely sane member of the general public.
Follow him on his website. http://rrvirdi.com/
Or twitter: @rrvirdi or https://twitter.com/rrvirdi
Christopher Ruocchio is the internationally award-winning author of the Sun Eater, a series blending elements of both science fiction and fantasy, as well as more than twenty works of short fiction. A graduate of North Carolina State University, he sold his first novel, Empire of Silence, at 22, and his books have appeared in 5 languages. He curated 8 short story anthologies for Baen Books, including Sword & Planet, Time Troopers, and Worlds Long Lost. His work has also appeared in Marvel Comics.
Christopher lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his family.
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Also included is a witty and pointed introduction by the editor, wherein he points out his interest for the fiction part of science fiction, leaving science by the wayside. This is just to say that a subtle genre distinction brings us Eric John Stark and John Carter instead of a plot that turns on scientific detail. The stories in the anthology, that is, are fantasy in space: character-driven, adventurous, and, though not devoid of science, much more interested in honor and courage than in time dilation.
Jess Cluess’s story, for example, could be right out of a collection of Leigh Brackett stories, a tale of a shipwrecked soldier dragging an unwilling damsel across a desert, unwittingly caught up in the planet’s politics. He does this for honor, because it’s the right thing to do to use his other-worldly strength to protect a strange woman in the desert.
The other thing all these stories have in common is that they’re good: even the ones I didn’t like all that much were written with the goal of entertaining the reader and weaving an adventurous and exciting tale. Sword and Planet has renewed my faith in science fiction and fantasy short stories. Anthologies like this are the best place to read good short stories. Most stories in the elite, Hugo-winning markets are boring, intentionally bizarre, blatantly agenda-driven (it’s the “blatantly” part that is distracting; see Oscar Wilde). Often they don’t qualify as science fiction; sometimes they don’t qualify as fiction. They certainly don’t qualify as fun, entertaining, or even interesting. They don’t offer anything new, or anything nostalgic about good science fiction. Most of them are not even good in literary terms. I don’t know why they get published, honestly, though I feel like the notoriety of particular names in the Readercon-attending community has a lot more to do with publishing than the quality of the stories.
The only downside to relying on anthologies like Sword and Planet for short stories is that all the authors are established, novel-writing authors. This is just a fact of life in today’s publishing world, where you can’t make a living writing for magazines. You can discover new writers in places like Writers of the Future, which is usually available in the anthology section at Barnes and Noble; but also check the magazine section, where I do regularly see The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov’s, and sometimes Analog. These magazines are better than the other elite markets, but they feature maybe one really good story out of ten. They seem more interested in winning awards (i.e. serving the Hugo voting community, which is a very specific group of a few hundred people) than in publishing stories that are good by the typical reader’s standards. Lots of people on the internet talk about starting periodicals that will reinvigorate short stories and bring back the “glory days” of Lovecraft, Smith, and Howard, but I have trouble taking any of them seriously. Most people writing short stories are writing them for other writers, not to appeal to people browsing Barnes and Noble. I think that’s sad, but it’s good to know that some editors are putting together anthologies that do appeal to that audience. Sword and Planet is one such anthology.
Edited by Christopher Ruocchio, Baen’s latest anthology features thirteen original short stories that manage to go in wildly different directions, ranging from fantastic adventure to hardboiled action, and in tone from black as pitch to comedic. What they share are tales of heroes facing down foes—be they alien, robotic, or something else entirely—with a blade in their hands and courage in their hearts.
There are some familiar names among the contributors, Jody Lynn Nye, Tim Akers, T.C. McCarthy, and Susan R. Matthews among them, and Warhammer 40K scribe Peter Fehervari even contributes his first original work, “Bleeding from Cold Sleep.” Despite this, two of my personal highlights from the anthology come from two contributors whose work I’m reading for the first time. In L.J. Hachmeister’s “A Broken Sword Held High,” Luddite colonists from Earth face dragons and invaders beneath an alien sky, as a young girl chafes against their pacifism. Cybernetic knights do battle to save humanity from an invading alien hivemind in R.R. Virdi’s “A Knight Luminary.” If you’re like me, these stories will soon send you looking for what else they’ve written.
In addition to the entirely original works, a few of the authors have penned new stories in their existing universes. Simon R. Green revisits the fan favorite Deathstalker series with “Saving the Emperor,” a short story offering a look into how the Deathstalker clan first rose to power and glory. D.J. Butler follows up his recent sword-and-planet novel In the Palace Of Shadow And Joy with another tale of the mercenaries Indrajit and Kish, as they attempt to solve a murder mystery in “Power and Prestige.” Ruocchio himself contributes a story set in his Sun Eater saga with “Queen Amid Ashes,” with a newly knighted Hadrian Marlowe and his legionaries sent on a rescue mission to a war-torn world.
The wide mix of stories, and the surprising places they go make this anthology a particular joy from start to finish. Sword & Planet offers a glimpse into everything that has made stories like these a popular standby since the pulp era, with enough creativity, variety, and talent showcased to prove that there’s still plenty of life left in the century-old genre. I recommend it heartily—maybe you’ll come away with some new favorites too, and perhaps a new look at a genre that’s enchanted readers since John Carter first set foot on Barsoom.
This anthology had thirteen original short stories that vary in tone and direction. They're each individual stories that share manage to go in wildly different directions of stories but at their base is the idea of the hero facing down all kinds of danger with sword at hand.
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Any anthology is always a risk, particularly when you’re spotlighting so specific a genre with a diverse pool of authors, and it’s here where my reservations with Baen’s “SWORD & PLANET” lie.
The stories, while imaginative, more often than not miss the mark in nailing such a specific genre. They flail about, dipping toes into multiple pools, crossing through more well trod traditional sci-fi territory, feeling more akin to the grim dark sci-fi of the Warhammer 40k universe, or even more militaristic Sci-fi along the lines of Heinlein.
“But Steve,” you say, “you have this anthology a five star review?”
Indeed I did, because while calling some of these stories ‘Sword and Planet’ is a bit of a stretch, these tales were still presented with beautiful prose, wonderfully weaved, and entertaining throughout. And those stories that did fully embrace the genre, embraced it with a skill and quality that made them endlessly entertaining. Outside of a few outliers (of which I will not speak, as I don’t see the need of picking on individual efforts) every tale included here was a breath of wonderful fresh air; surprising, smile inducing, and better having been told. Any fan of science fiction would do well to track this one down.