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jaceyFritz Leiber: Swords and Deviltry
(in Lankhmar – omnibus edition, Gollancz, 2001)
I missed out on reading Leiber in my youth, and knew nothing about him or his writing. The stories of Fahfrd and Grey Mouser were recommended to me by a friend and I must admit my hopes were high, but this didn't quite grab me as I'd expected it to. It turns out (upon googling) that the omnibus edition is in itself a collection of collections and all the Fahfrd and Grey Mouser stories (bar one, I think) were originally short stories or novellas, here collected in internal chronological order. If there had been an introduction which explained this I think I'd have read it in a different frame of mind. So I read Swords and Deviltry as if it were a novel. It isn't, though the stories hang together reasonably well as a single unit in which we see out two heroes independently leaving their homes and joining up in Lankmar. This is mostly their individual stories of them and their first loves. Perhaps Fahfrd and GM will grow on me with successive adventures. My main beef is with the edition and the lack of introduction, index and dates of first publication. A bit of a cheat, really. For now I'm not reading on in the omnibus, but now that I know each chapter can be read as an individual story, I might dip into it again sometime.
(in Lankhmar – omnibus edition, Gollancz, 2001)
I missed out on reading Leiber in my youth, and knew nothing about him or his writing. The stories of Fahfrd and Grey Mouser were recommended to me by a friend and I must admit my hopes were high, but this didn't quite grab me as I'd expected it to. It turns out (upon googling) that the omnibus edition is in itself a collection of collections and all the Fahfrd and Grey Mouser stories (bar one, I think) were originally short stories or novellas, here collected in internal chronological order. If there had been an introduction which explained this I think I'd have read it in a different frame of mind. So I read Swords and Deviltry as if it were a novel. It isn't, though the stories hang together reasonably well as a single unit in which we see out two heroes independently leaving their homes and joining up in Lankmar. This is mostly their individual stories of them and their first loves. Perhaps Fahfrd and GM will grow on me with successive adventures. My main beef is with the edition and the lack of introduction, index and dates of first publication. A bit of a cheat, really. For now I'm not reading on in the omnibus, but now that I know each chapter can be read as an individual story, I might dip into it again sometime.
