This anthology contains a good collection of short stories and stories by a range of authors. My personal favorites are “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Nakh-Maru” by Jessica Cluess and Ruocchio’s Sun Eater/Sollan Empire novella “Queen Amid Ashes.” This is a story that starts out as a standard new adventure in an established world and takes a bizarre turn that really confronts the characters with an astounding moral dilemma. I was really surprised, despite knowing that Ruocchio can absolutely pull this off (as he has in every other novel and short story I’ve read). Other bright points include Tim Akers‘ “A Murder of Knights” and Simon R. Green’s “Saving the Emperor.”
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.
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Stephen Power
A varied collection of science fiction grandeur.
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on September 19, 2022
