Kitabı oku: «The Book of Swords: Part 2», sayfa 3

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.

Ellen Kushner

Ellen Kushner’s first novel, Swordspoint, introduced readers to Riverside, home of the city to which she has since returned in The Privilege of the Sword (a Locus Award winner and Nebula nominee), The Fall of the Kings (written with Delia Sherman), a handful of related short stories, and, most recently, the collaborative Riverside prequel Tremontaine for SerialBox.com and Saga Press. The author herself recorded all three novels in audiobook form for Neil Gaiman Presents / Audible.com, winning a 2012 Audie Award for Swordspoint. With Holly Black, she coedited Welcome to Bordertown, a revival of the original urban-fantasy shared-world series created by Terri Windling. A popular performer and public speaker, Ellen Kushner created and hosted the long-running public radio show Sound & Spirit, which Bill Moyers called “the best thing on public radio.” She has taught creative writing at the Clarion and Odyssey workshops, and is an instructor in Hollins University’s Children’s Literature M.F.A. program. She lives in New York City with Delia Sherman and no cats whatsoever, in an apartment full of theater and airplane ticket stubs.

Here she introduces us to a young man newly arrived in Riverside to seek his fortune, one who, like many young men come to the big city before him, finds that he’s got a lot to learn to succeed—and that many of the lessons aren’t pleasant.

WHEN I WAS A HIGHWAYMAN

“Do it,” Jess said. “It’ll be fun.”

I had no wish to be a highwayman, even for a day, but we needed the money. So I considered it.

Since I had come to Riverside, I had learned that not everyone there gives a stranger from the country good advice. If Riversiders advise a new blade to challenge that guy over there by the fire to a duel—you can take him, no problem!—well, it’s lucky that you do turn out to be better than he is. Of course, now he hates you and won’t recommend you for any jobs uptown, which is where the glory and the money are. Bad advice.

But since Jessamyn and I had begun keeping company toward the end of winter, I’d learned she usually had my best interests at heart, especially when it came to advice about making money. She was expert at that herself: the cleverest con artist the city had to offer, according to her admirers, and the slyest shyster ever to pick a pocket, according to the others.

Jessamyn was pretty, too. A mane of moon-pale hair such as I’d never seen before, fun to get tangled in at night, fun to braid up tight in the morning so she looked like a middle-city girl, decent yet delectable. That was how she played her game.

We made a good pair. Silver and smoke; ice and steel, people said. I could go anywhere with her: suddenly, all the taverns of Riverside were open to me, even the Maiden’s Fancy, where women like Flash Annie and Kathy Blount told one another their secrets. Everyone knew Jess, and if they didn’t like her, at least they admired her skill—and the way she took marks in uptown. She knew the handkerchief trick, the Lost Baby trick, the Pigeon Drop, and the Lover’s Dare.

I never went on jobs with her, though, because it was important for people to know my face if I was going to get work—and it was very, very important that no one remember hers.

Jessamyn had a wardrobe a duchess would envy, for quantity if not for quality: velvet with the nap rubbed away in back, raveled silk stockings, lace frontlets and silk shawls stained underneath, ribbons in every color imaginable to trim and retrim her many hats, feathers picked up on the street—

“It just has to look right, Richard,” she’d explain. “No one’s going to lift up my fine linen skirt to see the patched petticoats underneath. If I paint a thing gold, and wear it like it’s gold, only a jeweler will know it’s not.” She arched her neck, laughing. “And I never get anywhere near a real jeweler, so that’s no problem.”

I stroked the nape of her smooth neck, where the soft hair grew in an arrow shape. “I’ll get you near a real one. We’re going to make money, Jessamyn—I’m going to make it. A swordsman can get rich in this town. Look at Rivers. And de Maris, before his last fight. I’m going to be better than them. And then we’ll go up to Lassiter’s Row and buy you gold earrings with jewels in them, the biggest they’ve got!”