Here at Paizo we're pretty darn proud of our Planet Stories line of fiction. Reviving classic fantasy and science fiction by the likes of authors such as Leigh Brackett, Henry Kuttner, and Gary Gygax has been a labor of love for Publisher Erik Mona, Senior Editor Pierce Watters, and Editors James L. Sutter and Christopher Paul Carey. It's with great pride, then, that we announce that Gary Gygax's Infernal Sorceress has been nominated for an Origins Award! Take a look at the back cover copy:
"The underworld of the Iberian Peninsula is a dangerous place, filled with cutthroats and swindlers, and no pair is more infamous than the gaunt man known as Ferret and the broad-shouldered mercenary Raker. Yet when the swashbuckling comrades are framed for the one crime they didn't commit, the scoundrels are faced with a choice: bring the true culprits to justice, or dance a gallows jig. In order to do so, they'll need to pull out all their tricks, stretching magic and muscle to their limit as they invade castles, battle subterranean monsters, and bluff their way through courts of nobles and shape-shifters in their search for revenge. Yet can even this canny, ruthless duo prevail against the beautiful witch that plots their downfall?"
Gary's writing style was certainly unique, and for those interested in his influence on the modern English lexicon, this article by Stephen Chrisomalis is worth checking out. Among other things, the article discusses how he popularized the little-used words eldritch and psionic, and effectively created the word dweomer whole cloth. Well worth the read!
Under the auspices of Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax created a number of iconic races, whether out of whole cloth or by combining a various different mythological and literary sources. So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when, in his final novel, he did it one last time. At first, I balked—up to this point, Infernal Sorceress had been a fairly hard-edged and gritty fantasy romp. What were a bunch of talking weasel-people doing here? Yet once I got past my initial knee-jerk reaction (which said that such things were better off left in one of Brian Jacques's Redwall novels), I realized that, in fact, they fit the story perfectly. After all, what's the point of fantasy if not to mix things up and make the reader question their standard assumptions? In throwing in something totally out of left field, Gygax was rattling my cage and reminding me that there's more to the genre than just the same old white-bread elves and dwarves we all know and love. And besides, their accents are totally adorable.
So with that said, I thought I'd offer you all the first (and quite possibly last) appearance of the ferretfolk:
Below, Ferret stared a second in horror. What little light there was danced and swayed wildly, but it was sufficient to show him the ugly mandibles and head of the steelback as the monster came up into the cave. The hole's exit was a tight fit for it, but the myriapod was forcing its hard body through it all too quickly. Each segment through gave it two more legs with which to haul the rest of it out to get at its prey. "Oh, crap! Now what?" Ferret cursed as he turned to look for a really fast means of getting up to the passage he wasn't sure would save them from the hunting giant centipede. At that moment a braided leather rope dropped in front of him. Ferret needed no urging, and he swarmed up hand-over-hand. "Where'd you get the rope, Ra—"
His jaw fell slack as he saw the welcoming committee awaiting him. One of that number jerked him all the way inside, pulled him out of the way, as two others rolled a rounded boulder to the brink of the tunnel. "—ker?
His companion was as shocked as Ferret. Raker gave his head a slight shake as if to say, "I haven't the slightest notion," and then stared at the two lithe forms which were just in the process of shoving the big stone over the edge. They heard a thump and a sharp crack followed by scrabbling noises which slowly died away.
"Gottum!" One of the creatures who had sent the boulder down chittered in something which sounded vaguely like human speech as it turned and showed a mouthful of sharp fangs to the two men.
"That's trade talk," Raker murmured, referring to the pidgin Phonecian commonly used throughout much of Ærth to conduct business.
"Sure, talk pretty fine with hewmuns allatime now and then, but no Stoatie. Nonono. Thurr we are—Ferretfolk you name we, us say Thurr." The creature trilled the r's as it pronounced the name of its folk. "See dead manyfoot?"
The creature talked as fast as it moved. Ferret couldn't believe this. They did look like huge, slender ferrets, down to their buff fur and black "masks." He gaped, then asked rather stupidly, "Real ferretfolk?" He had heard of them but never believed they existed. "I am called Ferret."
The one who had hauled him to safety ignored the question. "Come. See it broken. Good."
Both men went to where the creature proudly pointed with its nose, stared down to see the steelback below, forepart a gory ruin under the boulder. "You sure squashed the shit out of that head!" Raker said with enthusiasm.
"Bad thing, manyfoot. Kill hewmuns, kill you, kill Thurr, too, so we allatime kill 'em first. Pretty good, sure?" And as it rattled that off the creature showed its teeth again in what was surely meant to be an imitation of a human smile.
Ever since we started, there's been a question as to whether or not Planet Stories would begin publishing original fiction—and if so, when. After all, one of the structural foundations of the line to date is that we publish not just great sci-fi and fantasy, but important sci-fi and fantasy. How can you possibly know ahead of time that a new work of fiction is going to be culturally significant?
Turns out, sometimes that question is easier to answer than you think. When we set out to create Planet Stories, some of the first books we signed were the three Setne Inhetep books by Gary Gygax, The Anubis Murders, The Samarkand Solution, and Death in Delhi. Publisher Erik Mona had always enjoyed Gygax's Gord the Rogue stories (one of which we've now republished in Worlds of Their Own), and we felt that it was important to kick things off with Gygax, considering that, after Tolkien, he's probably had the most pervasive effect on modern fantasy of any author. If you stop to think about it, that's an enormous claim, but it's true—how many books in the fantasy section of your bookstore (or on your shelf at home) have their roots in Dungeons & Dragons? Certainly it was Gygax's work that had the biggest influence on all of us, and that put us in a position to one day start a fiction line of our own. And as Gary's health declined and interests had of late turned away from writing fiction, we believed that Death in Delhi, the last Gygax book to be published, would be his final literary legacy.
That is, until a year ago, when Erik called Gygax to see if he might perhaps have some unpublished short fiction sitting around that we could slip into an anthology somewhere. Obligingly, Gary dug around in his files, then came back and said that he did indeed have a few short stories—but he'd also discovered a complete unpublished novel he'd forgotten about, set in the same world as the Setne Inhetep books but far from Ægypt and starring completely new characters. Apparently TSR had turned it down for being too similar to Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar books (despite the fact that Leiber's son saw no problem with the manuscript), and the whole experience so frustrated Gary that he mothballed the novel completely. Would we, he asked, perhaps be interested in publishing it?
Needless to say, we leapt on the opportunity. Called Infernal Sorceress and introducing the characters of Ferret and Raker, the book is Gygax at his finest, chock-full of swashbuckling action, intricate magic, and strange monsters. And unlike Setne Inhetep, whose razor-sharp mind generally sees him on top of any given situation, this book's protagonists are more like Gord—smart and capable, but never quite to the extent that they think they are, always running from the situations their quick blades and loose morals get them into.
Written just after Death in Delhi, Infernal Sorceress is the true last Gygax novel in every sense, making it both the culmination of a life's worth of writing and the final adventure from the man who taught the world not just how to make believe, but that it was okay to do so. That, in fact, we should never have stopped. And that, more than anything, makes it an honor to be publishing this book.
How do you know an original novel will become important to an entire genre?
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