Underway: Swords and Deviltry by Fritz Leiber

“Lankhmar Book 1: Swords And Deviltry (Lankhmar)” (Fritz Leiber)

Content slowly trickles its way onto AzureScape!

With one of my monthly Audible.com credits, I picked up on audio version of Fritz Leiber’s Swords and Deviltry. Though I call myself a fantasy aficionado, I had never come across the name in my exploration of the genre. This audio presentation of Leiber’s Lankhmar series is introduced by none other than Neil Gaiman, who praises Leiber as seminal in developing the “swords and sorcery” sub-genre, a term which Leiber himself coined.

I only managed to listen to a few minutes of the audiobook so far. Nevertheless I’ve already come to enjoy Leiber’s descriptive and inventive writing style and use of language. By modern fantasy standards, the characterizations are certainly well-worn and clichéd, but this certainly would not have been the case in the 1960s when these stories first saw publication.

A full review will appear here once I’ve devoured the novel, hopefully sometime in the next week or so, but I thought I’d give you just a taste of what’s to come.