I Read Books: Swords In The Mist
I had thought that I’d read all seven volumes of the Swords series by Fritz Leiber, yet when I dug them out of the loft I only found six. Checking the cover picture on the internet it was unfamiliar to me. So it has taken until 2020 for me to have finally finished the whole set. (Previous voume review here).
All the stories in here are new to me. What are they like? There are a couple of spooky tales, one in Lankhmar, one at sea. There is some new linking material that connects the stories, filling in a gap or two. There is Lean Times In Lankhmar, perhaps the best in the collection, in which Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser give up their life of adventure and take up other professions; Fafhrd as an acolyte of the god Issek of the Jug, Mouser as the enforcer for a protection racket. It has some very funny scenes as their attempts to live these new lives ends up in farce.
Finally there is Adept’s Gambit, an early story from 1947, in which the pair find themselves adventuring on Earth, based out of the city of Tyre circa 200 BC. (Two different theories of stars are expressed in the books; firstly that stars are other worlds, bubbles floating in the great ocean (or rising from the great marsh) which this and other stories offer some circumstantial evidence for. The other is that they are great jewels lofted into the heavens by the gods, and some very significant evidence in favour of this one appears in Stardock in the next volume).
They are cursed so that every woman they embrace becomes a pig, except Chloe the cross-eyed Greek. Following the instructions of Ninguable of the Seven Eyes they travel with Ahura Devadoris to the Castle of Mist, there to defeat a wizard and then have the back story explained to them. This story feels oddly put together, as though the various parts were written at different times then just shoved in without regard to how they fit. As an early story, originally on Earth with no particular explanation (either Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser were casual inter-dimensional wanderers or Leiber had written a swords and sorcery story set in history without trying for a foolish consistency, as was the custom at the time), it has lots of interesting elements yet as a whole isn’t quite there.
Read This: Lean Times In Lankhmar is fun and Adept’s Gambit is an interesting failure with much to ponder on.
Don’t Read This: If Swords and Sorcery without much sense is not your thing.
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