The Sword of the Lictor

 
 
The Sword of the Lictor
by Gene Wolfe

Orb

1982, reprinted 1994
 

 
The Sword of the Lictor is the third book in Gene Wolfe's quartet, The Book of the New Sun. It's the most episodic of the books so far, basically a picaresque, as Severian leaves the city of Thrax and journeys north through the mountains until he arrives at a very high lake nestled among them, meeting potential allies and enemies all along the way. Based on Wolfe's description, I think these are the Andes mountains and Lake Titicaca of the far future. Over the course of the journey, Severian both literally and metaphorically leaves behind his career as a torturer and executioner, and starts to become something like a hero (though still without becoming someone I would call a good person). In the first book, Severian told us that this entire tale is being narrated in retrospect from a time when he has become the Autarch, and at this point it's still basically unimaginable how that might happen.
 
If there is a theme to Severian's journey in this book, beyond his transformation from villain to savior, it seems to be a kind of uncanny doubling. He interacts with nearly every major character he's met so far, or else with someone like them. He also becomes increasingly convinced of the power of the gemstone he found in the first book, the Claw of the Conciliator, and loyal to that power. The description of the Conciliator makes him sound like a Christ-like figure, which I suppose makes Severian something like a convert to Christianity, someone like St Paul who received divine revelation on a long journey.
 
At the start of the book, Dorcas says explicitly what was already clear to me from the original scene, that the Claw brought her back from the dead after her body had been preserved in a lake for a generation or two. She can no longer bear to stay with Sevarian now that he is the chief executioner in Thrax, and leaves to return to Nessus. Severian can't really bear to stay in this job either. He gets invited to a party thrown by the Archon of Thrax where he's expected to strangle a noblewoman to death; instead, as he did with Thecla, he has sex with her and then helps her escape her sentence. He is once again disgraced by his act of mercy, and is once again forced to flee to the north.
 
In the mountains, he stays the night with a family of farmers. Here he encounters the alzaebo, alive this time. In the second book, Severian drank a potion made from the alzaebo's brain and ate some of Thecla's, and it was this that put a copy of her mind inside his. The living alzaebo uses its abilities to hunt, imitating the voices of those it's eaten to draw out their living relatives in a way that's genuinely creepy. Severian fights off the alzebo but the only survivor is their young son, also named Severian, who is the same age our Severian was when he was orphaned and given to the torturer's guild. At the same time that he meets the alzaebo, Severian meets Agia again, and she again tries to kill him (I have no doubt she'll show up to make onee last attempt in the final book). She explains something that definitely wasn't clear to me earlier, which is that a particular recurring character I'd barely attended to is loyal to her as has been responsible to siccing the various alien monsters that ambushed Severian in the previous book on him.
 
After failing to save the rest of the family, Severian takes the orphaned boy on his trip through the mountains. He reads to him from the book of allegorical stories about the future history of the world. The neo-medieval character of the far future world Wolfe has written seems to be supported by the lack of any forms of mass transit, mass communication, or mass education, and by the dictatorial power structure that prevails at every level. People are trapped wherever they're born, assigned to be a farmer or guild member or soldier or noble, stuck with the personalist rule of whoever's in charge of their village or city, unable to learn much about any other way of living.
 
The little boy dies in the mountains, killed by traps left by a previous autarch, a man powerful enough to command an entire mountain be carved in his likeness. If the boy was like Severian's doppelganger, then he fails to save himself. The old autarch awakes from cryosleep with plans to reconquer and resubjugate the world, and Severian kills him, prefiguring on a smaller scale how he will have to defeat the current Autarch to take over the role. 
 
Severian also fights and kills his former friend, Balderdans the giant, another small-scale prefiguration of what I think is his fate to kill the alien giant Aiba, who lives in the ocean and grows large as a continent and plans to break the whole world. We'd heard repeatedly that Balderdans and Doctor Talos lived in a house in the north. Well, Severian finds it, and calling it a 'house' really undersold its size, or the way Balderdans rules all the villages around the lake. Nearly everything we initially thought we knew about the giant and the doctor has proven false or misleading by this point. 
 
Severian's executioner's sword is broken in the fight, completing his separation from his old life, and his two symbolic victories - against a lesser Autarch and a lesser Aiba - now set him up to complete the real versions of each task. I find Wolfe's plotting strange, but what initially appears to be an almost random sequence of events across this book looks by the end to be a map in miniature, a fractal part that repeats the pattern of the whole, including both what's come before and what has yet to come.
 
The other thing we've kept hearing is in the north is a war, between the country ruled by the Autarch, and a people called the Ascians, who we know nothing about. Severian plans to continue north and join the war in the next book, so I suppose we'll see.

The Council of Frogs

 
 
The Council of Frogs

by Matt Emmons
Second at Best Press

2023
 
  
The Council of Frogs is a fantasy comic by Matt Emmons. It's set in the wastelands of a post-apocalyptic future, but events are unquestionably guided by magic, rather than science. A tiny little frog goes out into a hostile world to deliver a message to a warlock for the sake of his community.

Generations ago, a war-mage died in battle, and his corpse sank into a bog ... then returned to unlife as a lich. His magic also fused with a purse of frogs' eggs; they became his children, unable to speak but imbued with intelligence. Now he's reaching the end of his unlife, and sends one frog as a messenger to ask the warlock to take over his duties as the frogs' guardian.
 
Our little messenger sets out on a quest to find the warlock. Along the way he encounters dangers in the form of hungry birds and human knights and war-mages. He's aided by a beast-man, an oracle, and eventually by the warlock too. Each of those three initially seem dangerous, and Emmons gives the little frog an expressive face that shows his fear. In each case, it kind of seems like they might be trying to win his trust so they can trick him ... but then no, they all turn out to be as honest and helpful as they initially said. No one who's actually hostile bothers lying to the frog; they just immediately attempt to eat him or stomp him underfoot. 
 
Something about this plotting choice bothers me, although I can't quite say what. Maybe it's just the contrast with the knee-jerk stranger danger of the media I grew up with? Over the Garden Wall also has characters who look scary, but whose protestations of innocence prove true, but somehow the depiction of the world as fundamentally less dangerous than it seems rings more true in OTGW. In The Council of Frogs, the world is in tatters, and human supremacists aim to kill or subjugate anyone who's unlike them. In that context, it's important for those others to trust each other and form coalitions for safety, but I feel like Emmons make that look easier than it should be.
  
Emmons portrays the world as a wasteland where medieval technology mingles with the last remnants of the old society. The frog meets the beast-man (who will eventually become his closest ally) near an oil pipeline. The oracle (who tells the way to the warlock) has four arms, two of them obviously robotic. The warlock himself is either a robot or wears futuristic plate armor. The knights and war-mages are armored as well, but their outfits are more obviously medieval. In the end, the lich does find a successor and passes on his magic to a new guardian, though not the one he initially expects.

Stages of Rot

 
 
Stages of Rot
by Linnea Sterte
Peow

2017, reprinted 2023
 
 
Stages of Rot is a deeply enigmatic comic that depicts the decomposition of a dead whale, not at the bottom of one of Earth's oceans, but on an alien world where all manner of sea life fly through the air instead, the undersea biome coexisting with and layered on top of the surface. And because the whalefall is on the surface, humans are now one of the scavengers that feasts on the giant carcass. 
 
Artist Linnea Sterte divides the process into chapters based on which human group is present and what they're doing, but we're only one small part of the process. Sterte shows us the fish, the fungus, the macroscopic single-celled organisms that arrive to play their own roles. You get a sense that you're seeing a series of close-ups on a larger picture, a whole functioning ecology that remains mostly out of focus and even out of sight. 
 
Successfully communicating that feeling, of watching one step in the functioning of a larger machine, without ever zooming out to show the whole, is no simple task, I suspect. Done incorrectly, and I think it would seem too simple, or else like chaos, with no sense that it's guided by an invisible order. Keeping you, as the reader, with that tip-of-your-tongue feeling in your mouth the whole time, without ever telling you the word or making you feel like you simply don't know it, is kind of an incredible accomplishment. Scavengers' Reign was rightly hailed for doing something similar, and it had the benefit of animation, being able to show its processes in motion.
 
We watch as the flesh-eaters come to collect blood and meat, and to slay the 'pilot' who we're told is a human-looking homunculus who lives in the whales heart and guides its flight. Fungus begins to cover the whale and form the heart of a forest. 
 
The bone-cutters arrive to collect their materials. One carves a diatom, which we're told live in the upper atmosphere where humans rarely see them, so that perhaps the statue represents a memory in the bone as much as in the mind of the carver. 
 
The barbarians are next; called to the whalefall by a vision or dream. For them the journey into the whale represents something hard to define, perhaps the passage into adulthood, though I might be wrong. The forest expands ever outward. 
 
The last humans to arrive, the entomologists, collect specimens of every kind of life that visits or emerges from the fallen whale. They catalog it all and fill a museum. They even resurrect the pilot, who lives in the museum for awhile, before flying away, to the highest part of the sky, to join with another living whale. The cycle is complete and begins again.
 
Sterte uses a limited color palette to give each chapter its own feeling, distinct from the others. The flesh-eaters and barbarians both have more pink and red, the bone-cutters and entomologists more yellow and green. The alternation feels like a cycle, like the turning of seasons, and feeds back into the sense of hidden order propelling the book. This is not an especially long comic, and it has very little dialogue, but it's very effective at communicating the mystery of the way bodies are reclaimed by the world after death. 

Shadowlands

 
 
Shadowlands
A Journey through Britain's Lost Cities and Vanished Villages

by Matthew Green

WW Norton & Company

2022 
 
 
In Shadowlands, author Matthew Green takes us to 8 sites around Great Britain where people used to live and now do not. These aren't small places that got absorbed by a bigger neighbor. A couple were replaced by public works, a couple were subsumed by the sea. The others were abandoned due to economic and social changes more so than to politics or climactic disasters. 
 
The chapters are arranged chronologically by the date of abandonment. The oldest site was an island village whose inhabitants left around the end of the Stone Age; the newest was a Welsh town that was evacuated and flooded in the 1960s to create a reservoir. Green tells us the history of each place - what it was like before, how its abandonment went, in a few cases how it was later rediscovered. He visits each site in person to tell us what they're like today. Perhaps because his head is so full of their history he tends to perceive them as haunted, unquiet places despite their stillness and solitude, the vivid past overlaid atop the muted present.
 
The quality of Green's writing makes this book especially interesting to read. His physical descriptions of place are evocative, with details that make it relatively easy to imagine what each place might've looked like in its heyday, and what it's like to visit now. His historical reconstruction is empathetic, but doesn't shy away from unflattering details. He lists all the ways the Marcher Lords, empowered by the English king to war with and conquer the Welsh, would've used the iron produced in Trellech, an ore mining and blacksmithing boomtown, the grievous injuries inflicted by weapons and implements of torture. He tells us of the piracy practiced by the port town Winchelsea, the ships burned and sailors drowned, and the toll of a famous, terrible naval battle fought off its coast. He tells us the toll of the Black Death in Wharram Percy, and the bloody bird hunts on St Kilda island, where sea birds and their eggs were the main source of food.
 
Some of the sites enjoyed a second life after an earlier disaster. Old Winchelsea relocated to the mainland as its island flooded. For a time, it was a major hub for wine merchants, until it was sacked as revenge for decades of piracy, with civilians killed inside the church where they sought sanctuary, and its harbor filled with silt, becoming too shallow for large ships to dock. Wharram Percy was devastated by plague, but it disappeared, alongside many medieval villages, because of economic changes. With fewer serfs available for farming, and peasants able to choose where to work and demand higher wages, swaths of farmland (along with the farming villages) were converted to pasture for grazing sheep.
 
Green also shows us the role that the loss (or rediscovery) of of inhabited places has had on British culture at various times. The city of Dunwich, built on a coastal cliff, progressively fell into the ocean over several hundred years as the shoreline kep moving inland, and its increasing ruin help inspire the first antiquarians to care about preserving Britain's historic sites, and served as a muse for generations of romantics and poets who wanted to contemplate their mortality. Philosophers traveled to St Kilda island during the Enlightenment because they thought its inhabitants existed in a 'natural state' and could resolve the ongoing dispute about whether humans are innately good or wicked. Later, Victorian tourists came en masse to gawk at the lives of 'primitives' living as the imagined their own ancestors might've. When we think about the past, we often use those thoughts to provide motivations or justifications for our actions in the present.
 
Shadowlands reminded me a bit of Cal Flyn's Islands of Abandonment. Both Flyn and Green visited places people no longer lived, though for different reasons, and they saw different things. Flyn's sites were mostly abandoned since World War II, often because industry or warfare made them uninhabitable, and she focused on the reintroduction of nature to those sites. The places Green visited are mostly older, and many are places people could still live, they just don't (and of those now unlivable, three are underwater). He's motivated by fears for the future, inspired by the covid pandemic and rising sea levels due to climate change, but at each site his focus remains on the past. I probably find these sorts of tours of lost places inherently fascinating, but I appreciate when they're thoughtful and written well.

Tower Dungeon 3

 
Tower Dungeon 3

by Tustomu Nihei
Kodansha

2025
 
  

The previous volume of Tower Dungeon ended on a cliffhanger, with a party of rival adventurers ambushing our heroes. In the brief, losing fight, Yuva (our audience viewpoint character) got knocked off a ledge, guaranteeing a 10 meter fall and a hard landing on the stone floor of the story below.

 

The whole mission had been a mess from the start. The Necromancer killed the king and kidnapped the princess, caused the legendary Dragon Tower to reappear, and took his hostage up to level 100, a kilometer above the base. The titular tower dungeon is big like a mountain, with a perfectly circular base, flawless construction, an impossible height and size. The royal guard sent to save her was massacred by the tower's perils, and the survivors were recalled by parliament, who wanted the royal-blooded guard to sit as a place-holder on the throne until the princess could be returned. 

 

Master archer Enriqo, fire magician Lilisen, and the recently conscripted Yuva were the only official rescuers left. A boom town sprung up outside the dungeon as ambitious adventurers sought to make their fortune by pillaging the tower. But the ambush wasn't just treasure hunters - they were a handful of former royal guards, now mercenaries, sent by an unknown rival member of the royal family to prevent the princess's rescue.

 

Now Tower Dungeon volume 3 opens with super-strong Yuva proving himself much hardier than anyone suspected. Until now, he's only used his strength to carry heavy supplies, and he's seemed to get hurt as easy as anyone. But he survived the fall, and we watch him scale the stone-block wall, endure several arrows, and overpower the mercenaries to save his friends. The trio seem bonded by the experience. Enriqo reveals something the mercenaries wanted - a magic arrowhead given to him by the departing guard captain, which should be able to slay the undead dragon on level 80. Lilisen was initially pretty dismissive of Yuva, but her feelings are warming rapidly.

 

Fearing there might be more mercenaries waiting back in town, they decide to push on despite their injuries. They find the all-girl adventurer gang the Excavators have been turned to stone by a basilisk, depicted here as a giant moth with eye spots on its wings. Yuva is turned to stone too, but Lilisen and Enriqo manage to slay the monster, returning everyone to normal. A goth gal from the gang kind of flings herself at Yuva which makes Lilisen visibly jealous. I think she likes him likes him. Later, she gives him a magic ring so they can hear each other's thoughts. The poor guy is so naive and innocent, but his thoughts reveal he likes her too.

  

The final chapter of this volume opens up the narrative a bit more. In his sleep, Yuva dreams of the kidnapped princess. It seems she's made a kind of psychic contact with him. Members of the royal family all have dragon blood, they live supernaturally long lives and some can transform into dragons. Lilisen's magic might be a draconic power too. The princess warns Yuva that the necromancer is trying to merge his consciousness with the zombie dragon, and that Bad Things will happen if he succeeds. When Yuva awakes and tells the others, Enriqo realizes something Yuva (raised by his grandparents in a tiny rural village) never guessed about himself - he's part of the royal family, and his super strength comes from his dragon blood.
 
Nihei continues to show us unusual takes on classic fantasy creatures. The basilisk moth is both imposing and different from any interpretation I've seen before. Up to now, interactions between Yuva and Enriqo have been a bit stiff and formal; between Yuva and Lilisen almost cartoony in their sibling-like antagonism. As the three become closer as a result of their shared experiences, their interactions also become friendlier and more genuine, with the barriers imposed by rank or rivalry coming down to allow more honest exchanges.

Fantasy Sports 1

 
 
Fantasy Sports 1

by Sam Bosma

Nobrow
2015

 
  

Fantasy Sports is a fun little graphic novel by Sam Bosma about a pair of adventurers who must defeat the mummy and win his treasure by ... beating him at basketball?

 

I've been looking for a term to describe fantasy stories like this one, where the worldbuilding is based on conventions derived from Dungeons & Dragons, but where the world doesn't specifically operate on game mechanics. The consensus among my friends is that there is no one standard name, but we might call the genre dungeon fantasy or rpg fantasy. I'm thinking of stories where Adventurers go into Dungeons to find Treasure and defeat Monsters. The adventurers might belong to guilds, and they probably have named sub-types based on their special abilities. These stories are usually a bit humorous rather than serious, and they often incorporate anachronisms and scifi elements - the kinds of things that come up while playing D&D with a group of friends.

 

In my search, a friend introduced me to the idea of litrpg, which is related, but I think different from what I'm talking about. In litrpg, game mechanics like character levels and hit points are literally true and part of the physics of the world, and the characters are aware of them. For dungeon fantasy, I'm thinking of Adventure Time and Delicious in Dungeon, not That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime.

 

In terms of length and humor, Fantasy Sports is kind of like an episode of Adventure Time. Mug and Wiz are uneasy partners in the Mage's Guild, and both would prefer to be paired with someone else. Mug doesn't actually seem to be a mage? He's a huge, muscly rage monster who can punch through stone walls and has no time for a nerdy sidekick. Wiz is a magical teen apprentice who thinks that Mug is too quick-tempered and short-sighted to teach her anything. 

They get sent into an ancient tomb their disparate approaches make quick work of all the traps an obstacles, but the final guardian is an undead pharoah who insists that he'll only give up his treasure if they can beat him at one-on-one basketball. Mug plays first, struggling against the pharoah's inhumanly long reach until Wiz gives him some advice to play to his own strengths. It's a near tie at the end when Mug gets injured and Wiz has to sub in. The pharoah's getting exhauated but convinced he'll win easily against a kid, and ... well, what do you think happens? C'mon. This is not the sort of story that has a sad ending. I think there are a couple more in this series, so I might try to check those out.

Mainly in Moonlight

 
 
Mainly in Moonlight
Ten Stories of Sorcery and the Supernatural

by Nicholas Gray
Meredith Press

1965, reprinted 1967 
 
 
Mainly in Moonlight is a collection of fantasy stories from the 1960s by Nicholas Gray. The stories are meant for older kids or younger teens. They're structured like fairy tales or bedtime stories. Each one begins "Once, not so very long ago," but they subvert the usual plotlines of the genre in a way that young kids might find frustrating or boring. These are stories of princes and princesses, sorcerers and magic, quests and adventures, but they never go quite how you expect, in ways that might be thought provoking, or disappointing, or both.
 
In Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn identifies four kinds of fantasy - portal fantasies, immersive fantasies, intrusive fantasies, and liminal fantasies, which are the kind I think is most relevant here. In a portal fantasy, we follow as someone from our world travels to a fantasy world. In an immersive fantasy, we are immersed in a fantasy world, following characters who are natives to it. An intrusive fantasy mostly takes places in our world, but fantastic characters intrude into it from some hidden and previously unknown place. And then there are liminal fantasies, which I think describes most of the stories in Mainly in Moonlight, where we follow a character who encounters the fantastic but turns away from it instead of going in.
 
In one story, we follow a lady-in-waiting who learns that a handsome prince has been transformed into a loathsome animal. She rushes to help him regain his human form, but when he offers to marry her she demurs. Unlike in "The Frog Prince", she wasn't looking for true love and didn't find it. She saved someone who needed rescuing, but that doesn't mean she wants to upend the rest of her life for him.
 
In the title story, "Mainly in Moonlight", a young man dreams his pregnant cat will give birth to a white kitten, and so he finds a sorcerer who'll make the dream come true, on the condition that he provides a month of drudgery and servitude in the sorcerer's house. He accepts but quickly regrets it. A creature trapped in the well promises to cast the spell instead, if only the guy frees him; he does, but is told he's now enslaved to the creature for a year. He's tricked by two other false rescues, before the sorcerer takes pity and gives him what he really wants - just to go home where (because the spirits did it all in one night) his cat has just given birth to three white kittens.
 
Things often come in threes in these tales. A meek king lives in fear of his selfish, demanding son. When the prince is visited by a great wizard in the night, he's given a simple task, which he immediately fails because he has no impulse control. As punishment, the wizard makes him spend decades as a tree in a snowstorm, conscious for every moment, then after two other tasks and two other failures, centuries as a cloud circling a mountain, a millennium as sand in a burning desert. By this point the prince has been fully broken emotionally, and is prepared to obey any command without question, but when the wizard returns him to the present and tells him to kill the king, the prince still refuses, because he finally appreciates his father's love. It's like the reverse of Abraham and Isaac, but the wizard never really wanted loyalty, just to teach a brat that lesson.
 
In one of the best stories, "According to Tradition", a selfish prince is paired with a generous younger brother. The king has always gone easy on his awful older son and been harsh and stern to the gentle younger, because he's a genre savvy monarch and knows from the tales that all beloved eldest sons are doomed and all meek, selfless second sons will ultimately inherit the kingdom. The boys go on a quest together, to rescue a neighbor girl who's been kidnapped by the fairies. Three times the meet a magical figure in need, the older boy is loutish, and the younger one helps out by giving up a cloak, a ring, an act of kindness. In the second half of the the quest, they face three trials, and each time someone who was helped returns to repay the favor. (I think this is a really classic fairy tale plot.) The older brother receives no help, but gets through by giving up his heart, his ability to wed a human girl, and then his humanity - he becomes a fairy himself. The younger brother is free to return home with the girl, whose kidnapping was only ever a pretext to spare the kingdom from the awful son.
 
"A Lady's Quest" deserves a special mention because it's about a tomboy princess rescuing her brother, who is implicitly, but very clearly, written to be gay. The prince hates hunting and the military, wants to laze about the castle in comfort, and calls whoever he's talking to 'darling' in every sentence. The princess opines that she'd've made a better boy and her brother a better girl ... and he doesn't contradict her. The prince invents a fake quest to get his father off his back, and uses it as an excuse to hang out with his very close male friend, who doesn't enjoy the company of ladies. Then the pair of them are kidnapped by a witch, and the princess gets to do what she's always wanted, and have a quest herself. She doesn't defeat the witch, just offers her a chance to come back to the castle, have friends, and be a lady-in-waiting. The witch agrees but fears she won't be any good at the feminine activities of a lady; the princess reassures her that her lack of skill won't matter. Nothing about the initial situation is resolved, no one uses magic to switch anyone's genders, the prince will still be put upon and the princess thwarted, but the story ends there anyway, in a move that's typical of these stories.
 
One thought I had about these stories is that by denying us characters who accept the fantastic, by denying us satisfying endings, Gray might be encouraging his young readers to make up their own second chapters to each tale, to imagine what a proper adventure and a traditional ending might look like for each of his reluctant protagonists.