Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 9

We have now finalised the contents for Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 9, which will include nine great stories:

The Cold Maiden by Eli Freysson

Assassin Eternal: The Memory Eaters by Andrew Darlington

To Raise the Shining Walls of Irem Once More by Tais Teng

Fulgin the Grim: Retribution by Ken Lizzi

Snow in Kadhal by Jaap Boekestein

Voyage to Vancienne by Gavin Chappell

A Pathway Forward by Lyndon Perry & David Bakke

The Left Eye of Phun Margat by Scott McCloskey

Sorcery in Nekharet by Steve Dilks

The artwork in the book and on the covers is, of course, by Jim Pitts.

Our plan is for the paperback and kindle ebook to be available before the end of the month, hopefully by mid-November.

Steve Dilks's story from Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 1 reprinted in A Book of Blades II

‘The Horror from the Stars’ by Steve Dilks, which was first published in Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 1 has been republished in A Book of Blades II by the people behind the Rogues in the House Podcast.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW - STEVE DILKS

 

David A. Riley: Steve, you’ve been prominent in the swords and sorcery genre for some time now, not only as a writer but as editor and publisher with your own imprint Carnelian Press, through which you brought out two fanzines, The Hyborian Gazette and Twilight Echoes – Tales of Swords & Dark Magic. Which came first, the writing or the publishing, and can you give us a rundown on your career so far?

Steve Dilks: With the fanzines, I just wanted to get something up and running really. The whole REH community was getting pretty boring to me. I wanted to get out of the whole debate, argument and counter argument thing and put something creative out there. I saw a lot of talent lurking in the peripheries, and I wanted a place to express that; a place where I could shout; “Come and look at what these guys are doing!” A lot of great artists and writers ended up getting involved. On that front, The Hyborian Gazette was a real success. It attracted a lot of interest, but it was too much for me to keep up with the demand. I decided to stop doing it, mostly for my own sanity. I was printing it by hand in my bedsit and taking trips to the Post Office everyday but making zero money. Twilight Echoes was an off-shoot where I planned to showcase new talent in the sword & sorcery genre. The idea and execution were great, but it flopped. No one bought it and the whole s-&-s scene exploded a couple of years later anyway with much better realized products.

 

As for my own writing, that was already there. My first proper sale was in 2019 when Weirdbook published my SF story, ‘The Idols of Xan’. I’m currently wrapping up a novelette for Jason M Waltz’ swan-song anthology, Neither Beg Nor Yield, which should be out sometime early next year.

DAR: Which other writers have been the biggest influences on your own sword and sorcery stories?

SD: Ok, I’ll come clean. I’m influenced by all of them! Even the bad ones! Why not? Sometimes it’s just a mesh of everything and nothing. Even other genres!

DAR: Like many sword and sorcery writers your stories have a number of continuing characters, like Bohun of Damzullah. Do you think this is an important feature and something readers prefer?  

SD: For me, it’s a fun thing to do and those who like the Bohun stories enjoy reading them. There’s just something fun about the serial format, following a character on a journey through a pre-classical world, exploring strange cities and hostile landscapes.

DAR: What are your feelings about sword and sorcery novels? These are not common, and some people feel the genre is better suited to the short story and novelette formats. Robert E. Howard only completed one Conan novel. Do you think you would ever venture into attempting one yourself?

SD: I’m actually writing a short s-&-s novel at the moment. I’ve never quite got why people think they’re not common. There are literally hundreds. I could do you a top ten list of my favourites right now! The only reason sword & sorcery was written in shorter formats was because they initially started in the pulps which catered for the short-story market. But even then there were exceptions. A. Merritt’s The Ship of Ishtar, for instance, was published in 1924 and Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword came out in 1954. There have been thousands of sword-&-sorcery novels since the ‘60s. Michael Moorcock wrote a fair few— The Eternal Champion, the Elric, Corum and Hawkmoon books. So did L. Sprague de Camp. Lin Carter did a series or two as did John Jakes and Gardner F. Fox. Then there were Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane novels, David C. Smith’s Oron, James Silke’s Death Dealer series…

DAR: Do you ever worry what constitutes a true sword and sorcery story or are you flexible in your attitude to the genre? Some people seem highly interested in laying down rules and lists of what’s needed to qualify as such. Does this bother you at all?

SD: Nope. If a story is well written it doesn’t need to worry about any of these things.

DAR: Print on demand and the increase in indie publishers has obviously had a big impact on the genre in recent years, with magazines like Savage Realms Monthly and the increased number of anthologies that seem to pop up with impressive frequency at the moment, as, of course, have online magazines such as Swords & Sorcery Monthly, not to mention eBooks – and, more recently, audio as well. Do you sometimes fear we could face an eventual glut of the market and that today’s apparent popularity might result in tomorrow’s boredom?

SD: Absolutely. It will happen, and go the same way the whole Cthulhu obsession did a few years ago. But as Lovecraft himself once wrote— ‘That is not dead which can eternal lie…’

DR: Where do you see the genre going next? Do you expect to see it shrink once more or, because of the proliferation of POD and indie presses, do you see it soldiering on? After all, without a reliance on the big publishers anymore, so long as there is a substantial enough core of fans out there to keep the genre alive, it will remain so. If so, who will be the next giants as such in the genre. In its golden age there were the likes of Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, followed by Henry Kuttner, Fritz Leiber, C. L. Moore, Michael Moorcock and a handful of others.  Who do you see as today’s? Or is there instead a vast proliferation of names too numerous to mention?

SD:  So long as the stories are good and the writers, editors and publishers are true to their craft there will always be readers. Those that will make a name for themselves in the genre will be those that can also write beyond it. All the writers you just mentioned are known for other things. Believe it or not, Howard’s biggest success in his lifetime were his humuorous western stories featuring Breckenridge Elkins—which everyone should read by the way. Kuttner was a diverse hand who worked in SF, horror and fantasy. Leiber won the Hugo Award for The Big Time and wrote critically acclaimed horror like Conjure Wife and A Spectre is Haunting Texas. Moorcock edited New Worlds and wrote The Dancers at the End of Time, A Cure for Cancer and Gloriana. A genre is only as healthy as the stimulus behind it. 

 

For more information about books by or including stories by Steve Dilks use the following links:

Steve Dilks UK

Steve Dilks USA

 

For information and news across the swords and sorcery genre join the

Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Group  

Congratulations to Steve Dilks on the publication of Black Dust and Other Stories

 

Out today Steve Dilks' Black Dust and Other Stories, which includes The Amulet and the Shadow which was first published in Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy volume 2.

Here's a link to view this on amazon.co.uk.

Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 2 - our contributors

Here are some brief details of the authors whose stories will appear in Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 2, to be published in June.

Opening the collection is The Essence of Dust by veteran horror, fantasy, SF writer Mike Chinn. Mike lives in Birmingham, UK, with his wife Caroline and their tribe of guinea pigs. In 2012 he took early retirement so he could spend more time writing (and not housework). Over the years he has published over sixty short stories, as well as editing three volumes of The Alchemy Press Book of Pulp Heroes, and Swords Against The Millennium, also for The Alchemy Press. His own contribution to the Pulp Adventure genre, The Paladin Mandates, garnered two nominations for the British Fantasy Award in 1999, and Pro Se Productions have recently published a revised and extended edition. Pro Se also published the second Damian Paladin collection, Walkers in Shadow, along with his first Western, Revenge is a Cold Pistol. 

 In 2015, his Sherlock Holmes steampunk mash-up, Vallis Timoris (Fringe-works), sent the famous detective to the Moon. Parallel Universe Publications has also published a collection of his stories, Radix Omnium Malum.

Tais Teng (Highjacking the Lord of Light) is a Dutch SF writer and illustrator with, in his own words, the quite unpronounceable name of Thijs van Ebbenhorst Tengbergen, which he shortened to Tais Teng ’to leave room for a picture of an exploding starship or a clever steam-punk lady on the covers of my novels.’

In his own language he has written everything from radio-plays to hefty fantasy trilogies.

To date he has sold sixty-eight stories in the English language and two children's books: When the Nightgaunt Knows Your Name and The Emerald Boy. His YA novel Phaedra: Alastor 824, set in the universe of Jack Vance, has been published by Spatterlight Press.

His most recent sales have been to Daily Science Fiction, Unreal, Lowlife and Cirsova.

English website: http://taisteng.atspace.com/

Art: https://taisteng.deviantart.com/

Martin Owton (Out in the Wildlands) lives in the south of England. In addition to some 30 published short stories, he has written 3 published novels: 2 non-epic adventure fantasies, Exile and Nandor – ‘which could certainly be called sword and sorcery’ – and a con-temporary fantasy Shadows of Faerie set in Southampton and the New Forest. A former member of the defunct T-Party Writers Group, he is represented by Shiel Land Associates. In real life he is a drug designer for big pharma.                  

 

Susan Murrie Macdonald (Zale and Zedril) is only one of three writers who also had stories in our first volume. Susan is a free-lance wordsmith: ghost-writer, blogger, journalist. She has published roughly twenty short stories, mostly fantasy, but also some science fiction, westerns, romance, and children's stories. She is the author of R Is For Renaissance Faire, a children's book based on her four years as a volunteer with the Mid-South Renaissance Faire.  She is a stroke survivor, although she has been out of the wheelchair almost two years and can limp half a mile with the help of a cane.  She is an ex-copy editor and an ex-teacher.  She still works as a freelance proof-reader.  She is a staff writer for SciFi. Radio with over a hundred articles posted on their website. She is, of course, working on a novel; ‘isn't everyone?’

Susan lives in a small town in Tennessee about twenty kilometres from Memphis.  She is married to a travel agent and has a son and daughter of university age. She has had stories in Tales from OmniPark, Under Western Stars, Space Force: Building a Legacy, Cat Tails: War Zone, Wee Tales, The Caterpillar, Sirius Science Fiction, Itty Bitty Writing Space, Bumples, Alternative Truths, More Alternative Truths, Paper Butterfly, Sword and Sorceress, Knee-High Drummond and the Durango Kid, Barbarian Crowns, and Supernatural Colorado. 

The second writer also to have been included in our first volume is Steve Dilks (The Amulet and the Shadow). Steve has been published in Weirdbook, Startling Stories, Savage Realms Monthly, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly and Savage Scrolls. His novellas of Gunthar, the Black Wolf of Tatukura were collected together in the paperback Gunthar - Warrior of the Lost World. Another collection, this time featuring his sword-&-sorcery hero Bohun of Damzullah is due to be published under the title Bohun; The Complete Savage Adventures. His second Bohun story The Horror From the Stars appeared in volume 1 of Swords & Sorceries.

Andrew Darlington, whose Antediluvia: Seasons of the World is arguably the most unusual story in this collection, watched the very first episode of ‘Dr Who’, he also watched the most recent episode.    He says that whatever academic potential he may once have possessed was wrecked by an addiction to loud Rock ‘n’ Roll and cheap Science Fiction, which remain the twin poles of what he laughingly refers to as his writing career. He is most proud of his Parallel Universe collection A Saucerful Of Secrets. His latest book is a biography of the Beatles spin-doctor Derek Taylor: For Your Radioactive Children (SonicBond Books). His writing can be found at Eight Miles Higher: 

Andrew’s website is  http://andrewdarlington.blogspot.co.uk/

Pedro Iniguez (A Thousand Words for Death) is a speculative fiction writer who also enjoys reading and painting. His work can be found in magazines and anthologies such as Space and Time Magazine, Crossed Genres, Dig Two Graves, Tiny Nightmares, Deserts of Fire, and Altered States II. His cyberpunk novel Control Theory (Indie Authors Press, 2016) and his 10-year collection, Synthetic Dawns & Crimson Dusks, (Indie Authors Press, 2020) are available on Amazon.

Originally from Los Angeles, he now resides in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he is currently working on his second novel.

Dev Agarwal is a science fiction and fantasy writer. His fiction has been published online and in magazines including Albedo One, Aoife’s Kiss, Aeon and, forthcoming, in Mithila Review. His non-fiction has been published online and in a variety of magazines.

Dev has been editing non-fiction for a number of years and is non-fiction editor for the magazine Khoreo. He is also the editor of Focus, the magazine for genre writers produced by the British Science Fiction Association.

His fantasy often draws on historical events. His story Stone Snake is the start of a series of adventures of the principal character travelling home.

Author of Seven Thrones, Phil Emery’s work has been published in the UK, USA, Europe, and Canada since the seventies. His particular claims to sword-&-sorcery infamy include appearances in the Rogue Blades’ anthologies Return of the Sword and Demons, and the experimental fantasy The Shadow Cycles, together with a doctoral thesis on the subject.  The sworder Zain first appeared in print in a 1972 story entitled Swords at Night.  Both he and his creator are a little longer-in-the-scabbard these days . . .     

 

Adrian Cole (The Eater of Gods) is the third writer who also appeared in volume one. He has been writing stories set in his own fantasy series such as the Voidal and Elfloq for many years, as well as reviving Elak, King of Atlantis, originally created by the late Henry Kuttner. Adrian’s first collection of Elak tales was published in 2020 by Pulp Hero Press to much acclaim. Though not sword and sorcery, his collection Nick Nightmare Investigates won the 2015 British Fantasy Award for best collection and he is a regular contributor to Weirdbook magazine, as well as having stories in anthologies such as Year’s Best Fantasy, Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Mammoth Book of Halloween, Occult Detective Quarterly Presents, and The Alchemy Press Book of Horror.

And, of course, there is the inimitable Jim Pitts. His amazing illustrations add much to the interior as well as the covers of this book. Jim’s career began in the 1970s when he created artwork for David Sutton’s ground-breaking fanzine Shadow. Since then he has contributed illustrations to an impressively wide variety of publications both here in the UK and overseas, particularly the United States. A hardback retrospective of Jim’s work, The Fantastical Art of Jim Pitts was published in 2017. This was split into two volumes for the soft cover version.  Later this year a second hardcover collection of Jim’s more recent work will be published by Parallel Universe Publications: The Ever More Fantastical Art of Jim Pitts.

The contents of Volume 2 are:

Introduction by David A. Riley

The Essence of Dust by Mike Chinn

Highjacking the Lord of Light by Tais Teng

Out in the Wildlands by Martin Owton

Zale and Zedril by Susan Murrie Macdonald

The Amulet and the Shadow by Steve Dilks

Antediluvia: Seasons of the World by Andrew Darlington

A Thousand Words for Death by Pedro Iniguez

Stone Snake by Dev Agarwal

Seven Thrones by Phil Emery

The Eater of Gods by Adrian Cole 

Illustrations by Jim Pitts. 

Volume 1 is still available:

amazon.co.uk

amazon.com

Parallel Universe Publications