I Read Books: Broadswords And Blasters: Futures That Never Were

 

Broadswords And Blasters: Futures That Never Were

This volume opens with an introductory essay on what is sometimes called the sword and planet sub-genre, starting with Edgar Rice Burroughs A Princess Of Mars (initially published under the name Norman Bean and the title Under The Moons Of Mars). A distinctive set of stories, which include sword play, alien planets, often humans arriving there without access to the sort of technologies you’d expect from spacefarers, and an alien sidekick. Dune, of course draws from it, and thus of course Star Wars, though these have been subsumed into space opera and/science fiction.

Many of the twenty stories in this anthology remix the classic elements into new stories. Some are distinctive. H R Laurence’s Hawks Over Aeolis has Victorian Aviatrix Hester Craven tangling with air pirates on a Mars whose natives consider flight blasphemy, in a chirpy, plummily written adventure. Matt Spencer’s Never Meet Your Heroes moves through space Western to weird horror arriving at a complex tangle of science fiction and revenge. The Tsar Of Fate by Josh Grilling has an alien ruler inspired by a science fiction artist attempt to kidnap him, and the comically inept hench-beings mixing things up. The Third Misadventure Of Hamzin by George Jacobs brings a voyages of Sinbad style to a space adventure with a naïve narrator. And Dark Hour by Made In DNA is a post-apocalyptic Japanese cyberpunk variation on the theme with swords, mutants and sentient chaos.

A spin-off project of the on hiatus webzine Broadswords And Blasters this anthology hasn’t ignited a renaissance of this style of pulp adventure planetary romance. Yet with a core of interesting and imaginative stories combined with a line-up of solid adventure tales, it shows there’s life out there for it still.

Read This: Exciting swashbuckling space adventures
Don’t Read This: Increasingly elaborate justifications for combining swords and aliens