Heroic Dreams - All Things Medieval

Swords and Sorcery is a great subgenre of fantasy and it goes all the way back pretty much to Robert Howard and his Conan works. And he didn’t realize this was what he was writing until Fritz Leiber coined the term “Swords and Sorcery” in 1961.

It is a great genre that has lots of fun and action but the female characters in the works tended to be one-sided (beautiful and ancillary to everything of substance). They were usually the damsel in distress.

But in the mid 80’s through the mid 90’s Marion Zimmer Bradley compiled and edited a series of anthologies called “Swords and Sorceress” where the female characters were center stage. There were 21 books in all and this is a great series of books.

If you want to read a bit more about this series here is a nice Wikipedia article about it.  

Here are some links to the books:

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword And Sorceress XXI (Sword and Sorceress) (This is the book shown here in this post.

Here is the first book in the series: Sword and Sorceress: An Anthology of Heroic Fantasy

Here is a quick amazon link to a list of the books The Sword and Sorceress books at Amazon

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