The Book of Swords. Gardner Dozois

published the infamous “pirated” edition of The Fellowship of the Ring (the opening book of the trilogy) as an Ace paperback in the first place because he was casting desperately around for something—anything!—with which to feed the hunger of the swelling audience for Sword & Sorcery. The cover art of the Ace edition of The Fellowship of the Ring (by Jack Gaughn, of a wizard waving a sword and a staff aloft on top of a mountain) makes it clear that Wollheim thought of it as a “sword & sorcery” book, and his signed interior copy makes that explicit by touting the Tolkien volume as “a book of sword-and-sorcery that anyone can read with delight and pleasure.” In other words, in the United States at least, the genre audience for fantasy definitely predated Tolkien, rather than being created by him, as the modern myth would have it. Don Wollheim knew very well that there was a genre fantasy audience already out there, already in place, a hungry audience waiting to be fed—although I doubt if even he had the remotest idea just how tremendous a response there would be to the tidbit of “sword & sorcery” that he was about to feed them. The Tolkien novels had already appeared in expensive hardcover editions in Britain, but the Ace paperback editions—and the “authorized” paperback editions that followed from Ballantine Books—made them available for the first time in editions that kids like me and millions of others could afford to buy.

      After Tolkien, everything changed. The audience for genre fantasy may have already existed, but there can be no doubt that Tolkien widened it tremendously. The immense commercial success of Tolkien’s work also opened the eyes of other publishers to the fact that there was an intense hunger for fantasy in the reading audience—and they too began looking around for something to feed that hunger. On the strength of Tolkien’s success, Lin Carter was able to create the first mass-market paperback fantasy line, the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line, which brought back into print long-forgotten and long-unavailable works by writers such as Clark Ashton Smith, E. R. Eddison, James Branch Cabell, Mervyn Peake, and Lord Dunsany. A few years later, Lester del Rey took over from Lin Carter and began to search for more commercial, less high-toned stuff that would appeal more directly to an audience still hungry for something as much like Tolkien as possible. In 1974, he brought out Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara, and although it was dismissed by many critics as a clumsy retread of Tolkien, it proved hugely successful commercially, as did its many sequels. In 1977, Del Rey also scored big with Lord Foul’s Bane, the beginning of the somewhat quirkier and less derivative trilogy, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson, and its many sequels.

      Oddly, as fantasy books began to sell better by far than ever before, interest in Sword & Sorcery began to fade. Sword & Sorcery had always been a subgenre mostly driven by short fiction, but, inspired by Tolkien, the new fantasy novels began to get longer and longer and spawn more and more sequels, and now began to be largely thought of as a distinct subgenre, “Epic Fantasy.” It’s sometimes difficult for me to make a distinction between Epic Fantasy and Sword & Sorcery—both are set in invented fantasy worlds, both have thieves and sword-wielding adventurers, both take place in worlds in which magic exists and there are sorcerers of greater or lesser potency, both feature fantasy creatures such as dragons and giants and monsters—although some critics say they can distinguish one from the other by criteria other than length. Be that as it may, as books thought of as Epic Fantasy became more and more prominent, people talked less about Sword & Sorcery. It never disappeared entirely—Lin Carter edited five volumes of the Flashing Swords! anthology series between 1971 and 1981, Andrew J. Offutt, Jr. edited five volumes of the Swords Against Darkness anthology series between 1977 and 1979, Robert Lynn Asprin started the long-running series of Thieves’ World shared-world anthologies in 1978, Robert Jordan produced a long sequence of Conan novels throughout the eighties before turning to his multivolume Wheel of Time Epic Fantasy series, Glen Cook produced recognizable Sword and Sorcery work (notably his tales about the Black Company) throughout the same period, as did C. J. Cherryh, Robin Hobb, Fred Saberhagen, Tanith Lee, Karl Edward Wagner, and others; Marion Zimmer Bradley edited a long sequence of Sword and Sorceress anthologies, with the emphasis on female adventurers, throughout the seventies, and Jessica Amanda Salmonson produced a similarly female-oriented set of anthologies, Amazons and Amazons II, in 1979 and 1982 respectively.

      Nevertheless, as the eighties progressed into the nineties, Sword & Sorcery continued to fade as a subgenre, until it was rarely ever mentioned and was in danger of being altogether forgotten.

      Then, at the end of the nineties, things began to turn around.

      Why they did is difficult to pinpoint. Perhaps it was the enormous commercial success of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, published in 1996, and its sequels, which influenced newer writers by showing them a grittier, more realistic, harder-edged kind of Epic Fantasy, one with characters who were often so morally ambiguous that it was impossible to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Perhaps it was just time for a new generation of writers, who had been influenced by the classic work of writers like Leiber and Howard and Moorcock, to take the stage and produce their own new variations on the form.

      Whatever the reason, the ice began to thaw. Soon people began to talk about “The New Sword and Sorcery,” and in the last few years of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century, there were writers such as Joe Abercrombie, K. J. Parker, Scott Lynch, Elizabeth Bear, Steven Erikson, Garth Nix, Patrick Rothfuss, Kate Elliott, Daniel Abraham, Brandon Sanderson, and James Enge making names for themselves, there were new markets in addition to existing ones such as F&SF for Sword & Sorcery, such as the online magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies and print magazine Black Gate, and new anthologies began to appear, such as my own Modern Classics of Fantasy in 1997, which featured classic Sword & Sorcery stories by Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance, The Sword & Sorcery Anthology, edited by David G. Hartwell and Jacob Weisman, a retrospective of some of the best old stories of the form, and Epic: Legends of Fantasy, edited by John Joseph Adams, an anthology reprinting newer work by newer authors. Most importantly, new short work began to appear, collected in anthologies such as Legends and Legends II, edited by Robert Silverberg, and later in Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, and Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders, the first dedicated anthology of the New Sword and Sorcery.

      All at once, we were in the middle of another great revival of interest in Sword & Sorcery, one which has so far not faded again as we progress deeper into the second decade of the twenty-first century. Already there’s another generation of newer writers such as Ken Liu, Rich Larson, Carrie Vaughn, Aliette de Bodard, Lavie Tidhar, and others, taking up the challenges of the form, and sometimes evolving it in unexpected directions—and behind them are yet more new generations.

      So, call it Sword & Sorcery, or call it Epic Fantasy, it looks like this kind of story is going to be around for a while for us to enjoy.

      I’ve edited other anthologies with new Sword & Sorcery stories in them, such as the Jack Vance tribute anthology Songs of the Dying Earth, Warriors, Dangerous Women, and Rogues (all edited with that other big-time Sword & Sorcery fan, George R.R. Martin), but I’ve always wanted to edit an anthology of nothing but such stories, which is what I’ve done here with The Book of Swords, bringing you the best work of some of the best writers working in the form today, from across several different literary generations.

      I hope that you enjoy it. And it’s my hope that to some young kid out there, it will prove as enthralling and inspirational as Unknown and Swords & Sorcery did to me back in 1963—and so a new Sword & Sorcery fan will be born, to carry the love of this kind of swashbuckling fantasy tale on into the distant future.

       K. J. Parker

      One of the most inventive and imaginative writers working in fantasy today, K. J. Parker is the author of the bestselling Engineer trilogy (Devices and Desires, Evil for Evil, The Escapement) as well as the previous Fencer (The Colours in the Steel, The Belly of the Bow, The Proof House) and Scavenger (Shadow, Pattern, Memory) trilogies. His short fiction