Tag: Speculative Fiction

Ruminating about sword & sorcery

tumblr_m4g7z4zmar1qmg4b2o1_1280Talking about Sword & Sorcery: a great article by Davide Mana!

Two months have passed since the last post of this blog. I am very sorry about this gap, but I had to “focus on production”, as one of my publishers always says. And I had to sacrifice the divine art of blogging, in Italian and English, on the altar of writing. This way, in a few months I completed three books and a great amount of short fiction… new stuff to talk about here, soon.

Then… in the meantime in Italy, we have had a “Sword & Sorcery Renaissance” (sort of), with a new movement of writers and publishers working on different projects (remember the short fiction I was talking about?).
What can Italian writers add to the Sword & Sorcery genre, in this decade? Italian Sword & Sorcery movement is working in continuity with the great US writers of the last century but with a new-pulp attitude, and with “Italian-Mediterranean” settings and mood, the latter two as THE elements that can distinguish our ideas and writings from everyone else.

So… my friend and colleague Davide Mana, blogger and writer very much better than me (I have to admit this), is part of this “movement” too and wrote down something interesting on the matter, after a long time discussion we have had on our blogs and in the Italian S&S website…

This is what he thinks on Sword and Sorcery!

Karavansara

scan0001I am writing an article about sword & sorcery.
Now, mind you, I have written a lot about the genre – a lot of scraps of ideas, scattered here and on my Italian blog, basically me, talking out loud in a vain attempt at putting my ideas in order.
But this time it is different – because I have pitched an article to a learned magazine, and therefore I must write something that will, hopefully, make sense.

I have been through a lot of discussions, in the last few weeks, about the definition of sword & sorcery – and indeed a good friend of mine just posted on his blog a thing called The Definition of Sword & Sorcery (According to Myself), grab yourselves a translation system and check it out, it’s not bad, not bad at all1.
But I still find it extremely unsatisfactory.
And of…

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The Altar of the Toad

My old buddy Davide Mana struck again! The Altar of the Toad is a new Aculeo & Amunet adventure and you can find it on Sword & Sorcery Magazine #50!
In “The Altar of the Toad”, the Roman soldier Aculeo and the Egyptian sorceress Amunet encounter an ancient evil in the Black Sea. Davide has self-published other stories featuring the same characters, but this is his first appearance in Swords and Sorcery. In the Magazine you can also find “Old Bones”, by Andrew Muff.

Karavansara

I am happy to announce that my new Aculeo & Amunet story, The Altar of the Toad has been published in Issue 50 of Swords and Sorcery magazine, and can be read on-line, for free, by clicking on the link above.

Screenshot from 2016-04-01 11:40:10.png

In this new story (the first Aculeo & Amunet story not self-published), our heroes will face a strange menace along the coast of the Black Sea.
The story follows the events described in the collection The Hand of Isfet, but as always it is a stand-alone adventure.

Enjoy!

Oh! And… comments are welcome as always!

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Imago Mortis -The Novel

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Imago Mortis is the Role-playing Game I’m working on: I already said that. But where does the whole project come from? Here is the Italian novel from which we got the idea: Imago Mortis by Samuel Marolla. Continue reading “Imago Mortis -The Novel” →