SF Signal a demandé à plusieurs auteurs quelles étaient selon eux les meilleurs histoires de Sword & Sorcery.

Toutes les réponses sont ici.

Voici celle de Martha Wells et Mercedes Lackey :


Martha Wells :
"I've read and enjoyed a lot of sword and sorcery, including the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser series, and Robert E. Howard's Dark Agnes stories. One of my earliest favorites was Charles Saunders' Dossouye stories, which first appeared in the anthologies Amazons! and Sword and Sorceress in the early 80s. When I read the first one, "Agbewe's Sword," I was about fifteen years old and desperately looking for strong female protagonists. The setting of an alternate version of Africa, using cultures and myths that I wasn't familiar with, also really set the stories apart for me. The stories are available now in a collection titled Dossouye, and I highly recommend it.

I also loved Tanith Lee's sword and sorcery, like The Storm Lord and Vazkor, Son of Vazkor, the sequel to The Birthgrave, and her Cyrion stories, which had the main character solving magical mysteries during his adventures. The settings are so lush and rich and detailed, with the feeling of starting out in a strange place, only to follow the characters somewhere much stranger. "

Mercedes Lackey :
"The answer to this question for me is a no-brainer.

C.L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry series.

It was the first time--for me at least--that I had encountered a tough, smart, independent female sword-swinger. Astonishing considering that these stories were published between 1934 and 1939.

* "Black God's Kiss" (October 1934)

* "Black God's Shadow" (December 1934)

* "Jirel Meets Magic" (July 1935)

* "The Dark Land" (January 1936)

* "Quest of the Starstone" (November 1937) (with Henry Kuttner)

* "Hellsgarde" (April 1939)

Suffice to say there is a little bit of Jirel in most of my swordswomen--and no few of my sorceresses.

Moore was a fine wordsmith and her work definitely stands up to the passing of time, but where she really shines is in her characterizations. The Jirel stories were not hack-and-slash, they had complicated characters, with complicated emotions. Brilliant stuff.

C.J. Cherryh once said that all of us female sf/f writers are Moore's daughters, and I am not going to argue with that."