Paying the Graphite Price: Swords Against Death, by Fritz Leiber
Hey friends. I’m pleased to introduce to you a new recurring segment. I have the good fortune to live in a neighborhood with a thoroughbred small bookstore with a great used book selection. It’s called Lost City Books, and I recommend you swing by if you’re in DC some time before the city breaks off into the sea/gets nuked/is absorbed into a curious wizard’s giant mirror.
Pawing through the slender sci fi and fantasy novels of the 60’s through 80’s is one of my favorite ways to decompress. It’s a tactile gallery of cover art, an archaeology of imagination, and a treasure hunt. As a bonus, you can buy one and actually read it. That’s what I’m gonna do. Sift through the shelves and pick out books that look cool, read ‘em, and talk about ‘em. Paying the Graphite Price is a Greyjoy nod to the common used book price tag - a pencil mark on the corner of the first page.
Swords Against Death - Fritz Leiber
May as well start big. A lot of the brittle old tomelets on these shelves are rare relics by authors I’ve never heard of, but this ain’t one. The adventures of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, as chronicled in Leiber’s many Swords volumes, are a ruby red skull-shaped touchstone in fantasy literature. This is the first time I’ve touched this particular stone, so let’s see how it feels.
This stuff is up my alley all the way to my little side door, down my narrow stairway to my comfy reading spot. A series of self-contained adventure stories linked by an arc that slowly gains prominence further along in the book. it follows a pair of bantery rogues as they chase weird rumors and bizarre leads, elegantly blunder into strange messes and clumsily finesse their way out of them. The interplay between the dual leads - a huge but thoughtful barbarian and a sly but kindhearted thief - holds everything together. Their friendship may be the most genuine I’ve seen in this kind of story. It’s got just the balance of affection, goofing off, and back-to-back death-defiance it needs.
I also love Leiber’s piecemeal, what’s-around-that-corner worldbuilding. I get pulled into the worldbuilding vortex a lot. It’s an enticing escape loophole from actually writing a story. The world of Newhon has its broad strokes established, which gives the duo a framework for their exploits. With each story, Leiber creates some new place, group, or piece of history for them to encounter. For the reader it creates the sense that endless marvels await in the stories ahead. For the writer it releases you from your own restraints. The freeing feeling that ‘anything could be out there’ is something I need to play with more in my own writing.
To sum up, if you like adventure in any way whatever - and you should, adventure is great - you oughta give Fritz Leiber’s Swords books a read. The writing style hits a midpoint between elevated fantasy language and self-aware wittiness as perfect as splitting the last guy’s arrow in half on the target. The rest of the series has swashed its buckles right onto my to-read scroll.
