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Who says the gods haven't a sense of humor?
Does anyone on my friendlist know Dorothy J. Heydt and why her Cynthia stories were never collected? They are some of my favorite short classical fiction and they are impossible to find and read in order unless you have access to fourteen Sword and Sorceress anthologies, which I almost do.
I grew up with the original Sword and Sorceress (1984) on my parents' shelves. It was my introduction to a whole bunch of authors, including Heydt, but "Things Come in Threes" never made that much of an impression on me as a child. I got the rock-paper-scissors punch of the ending, but the historical in-jokes eluded me until my first or second year of college when I could read Greek as well as Latin and I was learning classical history and all of a sudden the story was hilarious. After that I foraged through used book stores for the last sixteen years of Sword and Sorceress and bought all the ones that contained stories of Cynthia, daughter of Euelpides. Evidence of this box I just unpacked suggests that this process maxed out in 2000 with "An Exchange of Favors" in Sword and Sorceress XVII, leaving me with eleven anthologies. The Internet Database of Science Fiction tells me there are three further Cynthia stories I've never read. I don't know if they form a full cycle or if they break off. I hope they stay good. As late as 2005, I was hoping the author would put out some kind of collection or mosaic novel—the Cynthiad, maybe?
It's ten years later and there is still no collection and this makes it very difficult to recommend the stories. At this point I would accept an e-book, and I hate reading off screens. Was there some weird copyright issue? I can't believe there wasn't enough of an audience for beautifully written, wry, well-researched, correctly estranging and intelligent third-century-BCE history plus magic to make publication worthwhile. Does anyone have any idea what happened?
[edit] I have been informed that the editor who bought the stories individually rejected the collected cycle on the grounds that it lacked a plot. I disagree with this profoundly, factually as well as morally. Self-published edition? I'd throw money at it.
[edit edit] The author provides an explanation for the absence of self-published editions in comments.
I grew up with the original Sword and Sorceress (1984) on my parents' shelves. It was my introduction to a whole bunch of authors, including Heydt, but "Things Come in Threes" never made that much of an impression on me as a child. I got the rock-paper-scissors punch of the ending, but the historical in-jokes eluded me until my first or second year of college when I could read Greek as well as Latin and I was learning classical history and all of a sudden the story was hilarious. After that I foraged through used book stores for the last sixteen years of Sword and Sorceress and bought all the ones that contained stories of Cynthia, daughter of Euelpides. Evidence of this box I just unpacked suggests that this process maxed out in 2000 with "An Exchange of Favors" in Sword and Sorceress XVII, leaving me with eleven anthologies. The Internet Database of Science Fiction tells me there are three further Cynthia stories I've never read. I don't know if they form a full cycle or if they break off. I hope they stay good. As late as 2005, I was hoping the author would put out some kind of collection or mosaic novel—the Cynthiad, maybe?
It's ten years later and there is still no collection and this makes it very difficult to recommend the stories. At this point I would accept an e-book, and I hate reading off screens. Was there some weird copyright issue? I can't believe there wasn't enough of an audience for beautifully written, wry, well-researched, correctly estranging and intelligent third-century-BCE history plus magic to make publication worthwhile. Does anyone have any idea what happened?
[edit] I have been informed that the editor who bought the stories individually rejected the collected cycle on the grounds that it lacked a plot. I disagree with this profoundly, factually as well as morally. Self-published edition? I'd throw money at it.
[edit edit] The author provides an explanation for the absence of self-published editions in comments.
no subject
Alas, I don't remember them at all, and I don't think I own them any more :(
no subject
It was for many of them! Or, if not technically armor, then at least "completely reasonable clothing for a person who carries a sword and doesn't live in a pin-up calendar."
no subject
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/8118kjP23DL.jpg
(Was there a Heydt story in that one, do you remember? That's the one I have the fondest memories of).
no subject
Well, she had just single-handedly routed the enemy commander and his really fancy siege machinery. You want to remember moments like those.
(Was there a Heydt story in that one, do you remember? That's the one I have the fondest memories of).
Yes! That's "The Gift of Minerva," a murder mystery set aboard a Roman ship. It may be the only story in the cycle without explicit supernatural action, unless you count the possibility of divine inspiration; it's also one of my favorites.
The stories I had remembered best since college were "Things Come in Threes" (Sword and Sorceress), "The Song and the Flute" (S&S III), "The Noonday Witch" (S&S IV), "The Gift of Minerva" (S&S X), "The Curse of Tanit" (S&S XIII), and "Honey from the Rock" (S&S XVI). Some of the ones I'd forgotten, however, were just as good.
The protagonist of the series is a twenty-two-year-old Alexandrian Greek widow, a physician and later magician—"the witch of Syracuse"—traveling around the Mediterranean shortly before the First Punic War. Some of her exploits include an encounter with the last of the Sirens, several confrontations with the goddess Tanit, turning into a cat, rescuing a man from the underworld, doctoring an ailing Artemis, and breaking a curse stitched into a wedding dress. I can't really think of another series like them; there are classical detectives aplenty, and historical fiction around famous figures, and more fantasies than I can name that draw in some way on the ancient world, but a series protagonist making her way through the interstices of history with matter-of-fact gods and magic? Maybe Gene Wolfe's Soldier of the Mist (1986) and sequels, but half the point of those narratives is the interaction of the fantastic with the protagonist's retrograde amnesia. Cynthia has a long memory and knows exactly who she is. Seriously, if you like her, I'm not entirely sure what else to recommend.
[edit] This is going to lead to me putting together a post about my favorite fiction with classical settings, I can tell. Just not right now, because I need to leave the house for a job!